What I learnt from my co-curriculum course
Introduction
I am a first-year first-semester international student from Myanmar in Malaysia taking an artificial intelligence course at “Asia Pacific University”. One of the courses was co-curriculum, where I had to collaborate with random teammates on executing a game booth together while other first-years doing the same. This article is my mini reflection on what I have learned from this event.
Sales
As one of the team members who was trying to manage sales activities by standing in front of the stall and talking to people, I realized that convincing people to purchase your product from you is very difficult when you have lots of competitors who are selling similar or better products at competitive pricing. Most of the sales that went through me were because of my previous connections with the customers rather than conviction. I am unsure if this was caused either from my incapability to sell effectively or the overwhelming number of booths the customers could choose from. Whatever the reason was, it had made clear to me that being able to sell is a soft skill that I need to master no matter the case.
Expectation vs Reality
Our stall was selling two games, buzzwire and balloon stomping. I personally thought that balloon stomping would be more popular given the nature of the game, but the result said otherwise, as Buzzwire drew in more than 60 percent of our revenue on the event day. That made me realize that even though I might like what I am selling, that won’t mean that my customers would like it the same way. Thorough market research is necessary before a person should go all-in into their product, as impediments like this would be nerve-wracking and unrecoverable.
Future Aspects
Selling is crucial whether I am trying to sell a product or myself. Having the knowledge to sell myself properly would allow me to open a broader range of opportunities that would give me a good headstart compared to my rivals. That also has to be complemented by hard skills to make myself stand out so that my presence doesn’t get drowned in the sea of competition. I consider that by combining those two, I would be able to achieve a fantastic outcome in the long term.
It is essential to replace guesswork with more thorough research on the market by looking at key metrics. Intuition and ideas are good starting points, but they shouldn’t be relied upon too much, as that would stop me from comprehending critical life-or-death information that could change the outcome of my entire career.
To conclude, the course helped me to realize that proper and masterful usage of the two is indispensable if pro-longed growth is what I anticipate out of my future career.
