University of Richmond event puts sales in the career spotlight
STUDENT EXPERIENCE
Spiders meet business partners, learn about working in sales at a Robins School kickoff for the Professional Selling Program.
Between 80 and 90 percent of all marketing students find their first job in sales. Dennis Elwell wants to make sure they’re ready for the opportunity.
Elwell is director of Richmond’s Professional Selling Program, which arms students with strong sales and life skills that can be applied in finance, accounting, consulting, and a variety of other career pursuits in addition to marketing. The program held a kickoff event in the Robins School’s Moelchert Commons last week that introduced students to the initiative and its business partners.
“These are six employers that are super-interested in interviewing our students,” Elwell said. “They love our students because of their liberal arts background, the strength of their communication and soft skills, and their analytical skills like critical thinking.”
At the event, representatives from Unum, Cvent, Nucor, Enterprise Mobility, Alpha Sights, and Paycom networked with students interested in UR’s program.
Senior Alejandra Trochez, who is taking a professional selling class, was at the fair. “I’m looking at different prospective careers,” she said. “I do have my eye set on marketing, but I’m also open to other potential careers within sales.” She enjoyed meeting the representatives and found it helpful “to see how they’re selling their company.”
The program’s early days
Richmond has offered professional selling classes for a decade, but after joining as director in June 2025, Elwell has added more structure to the program. In doing so, he drew from his more than 30 years of experience in marketing and sales, concluding his career as group vice president of sales for Verizon Partner Solutions. For many of those years, he lso worked as an adjunct for the professional selling program at VCU.
“I began to realize that there was essentially a repeatable process that the centers had to have,” he said. “Number one, a strong academic profile, and building on the great work that Dr. Jeff Carlson and Bill Bergman have done here at Richmond, we had a lot of it already in place academically.”
The program has grown from offering one class per year to five. “A large part of what we teach is consultative selling,” said marketing professor Jeff Carlson. “Students learn to listen to a client, understand their needs, and offer a customized solution.”
Role-playing a key part of program
Today, there are 109 recognized university sales centers, and such programs are a recent development, Elwell said. In the Richmond program’s first year, the Sales Education Foundation rated it a Top Program, and it became an associate member of the University Sales Center Alliance. Students in the program can qualify for DiSC sales certification.
In their classes, students receive a business case and assume the role of a salesperson. They offer their plans to clients, portrayed by the program’s educators and business partners, who ask tough questions.
“We recreate real-world experiences for these students,” Elwell said.
The role-playing takes place in Robins’ Spider Selling Lab, where students’ efforts are captured on video and replayed as part of the learning experience.
This semester, the program opened its Introduction to Professional Selling course to students of all majors, and 11 of the 16 of them are from outside the Robins School.
“I think that’s really strong evidence that biology majors or chemistry majors that want to go into pharmaceutical sales see the value of having these skills,” Elwell said.
Gaining confidence through competitions
Elwell has ramped up the opportunities for students by increasing how often they take part in national selling competitions, up from once a year to twice a semester. Spiders had strong individual finishes in the University of South Florida’s Selling with the Bulls, with several students earning top three finishes out of over 550 competitors from 81 universities in 2025. Teams also did well in the National Team Selling Competition at Indiana University. Last January, UR initiated the annual cross-town Capital Cup with VCU.
Myrick Crampton, a 2025 alum who is now an associate in market research at Kantar, placed in the winners’ circle and second overall at Selling with the Bulls in spring 2025. Through the competition, he leaned into personalizing outreach and requests to potential clients.
“A part of the competition was leaving a voicemail and emails and sending LinkedIn messages to get that first meeting with the client,” he said. “We learned to be quick on our feet. We’d practice in the B-school to learn how to respond counterarguments and think about all the possible scenarios that may occur.”
Elwell enjoys watching students grow in confidence in the program. He remembers an introverted student who took part in a team competition last year and then landed a sales position after graduation.
“She credits the selling experience that we had at Indiana for really bringing her out of her shell and giving her confidence to speak publicly and overcome objections from a customer,” he said.
“When I first met her, I thought, ‘Gosh, she's awfully quiet.’ By the end of the competition, she was roaring.”