Having recently been promoted to Director of New Business Sales, part of your new responsibilities is to create a presentation for the next sales managers’ meeting. Since you are still relatively new at giving presentations, you want your slides and corresponding notes on the slides to offer enough detail to make you prepared for the open “question and answer” session that will immediately follow your presentation.
Your presentation will be delivered via PowerPoint slides to highlight main ideas and will utilize the PowerPoint notes feature to include specific details for each slide that will reinforce the communication provided via the slide.
The PowerPoint presentation should include:
    Strategic sales plan overview for the new spice blend including:
o    Sales vision statement
o    Sales force’s objectives/goals that compliments the marketing plan
o    Recommended sales tactics to meet the sales objectives
o    Suggested metrics that will evaluate success in meeting objectives
    Evaluation of the suggested sales plan through the key questions:
o    Who: Target buyer overview
o    What: Key selling features and benefits
o    Why: Highlight comparison to competitive products
o    When: Timing of sales events (ie, launch, promotional periods if you recommend them, etc)
    Recommended communication style the sales force should use for the product launch with customers
Please note any details not noted above can be created by the student, but must be consistent with acceptable and common business scenarios.

This essay should be between 900 and 1000 words, excluding the required annotated bibliography.

The Toulmin essay will help you practice what you have learned so far in this course. First, you will choose a topic of interest. Make sure that you choose a public debate with clear sides and staked. Then, you need to research that debate in order to narrow the topics scope, so it can be easily discussed in 1000 word essay. For example, you may be interested in learning more about traffic issues in the United States. However, that topic is too large to cover in a 1000 word essay. After researching peer reviewed articles that discuss US traffic issues in general, you may discover that the metro system in the District of Columbia is underfunded and underutilized.  Through your research, you found that you could make a claim that more funds should be made available in order to upgrade the metro system, which would improve traffic issues in the District of Columbia. This would make for a stronger, specific argument. Attached below is a PDF on sides and stakes that can help with this process.

This should be a thesis-driven essay, and it should be in the third person.

This essay must include a minimum of five sources.  Three should be peer-reviewed sources, preferably from the APUS databases. From the library welcome page, click on Advanced Search at the bottom of the page and then check the “peer reviewed” sources box filter.

This video will hopefully clarify the term, “peer-reviewed”.  You may use eBooks; however, as discussed in your textbook, books generally are not as current as peer-reviewed articles.  You may also use primary sources (interviews, statistics, etc); however, these primary sources should be obtained from experts within that field.  If you cannot find strong sources for your chosen topic, then change your topic. If you have a question about the validity of a source, please email me, or post your question to the open forum.

Note: Consider your audience as laymen in the field with only general knowledge of your topic.

Make sure to include the following sections in your essay:

an introduction and claim,
background,
body,
and a conclusion.

Within the body of your essay, make sure to include the following in any order:

support for your claim,
opposing or alternate views,
the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents’ claims,
and your rebuttals of their claims.

After you have written your essay, please make sure to revise the content of your essay. Lastly, be sure to edit your essay by checking grammar, format, and smaller technical details. Please make sure your essay is written in third person.

The Annotated Bibliography

An annotated Bibliography (AB) is due with your Toulmin essay. Using the MLA guide, list each source as it will appear on the Works Cited page of your essay. Summarize each source in two or three grammatically-correct  sentences, and indicate how it will be useful to your project. These short discussions are the “annotations.”