In the summer of 2025 I won first place in the nation in impromptu speaking at the FBLA National Leadership Conference. The format is simple and a little brutal. You draw a topic, you get a few minutes to think, and then you stand up and talk for four minutes in front of judges who are scoring every sentence.
I went in treating it like a speech competition. I came out realizing it was a sales competition in disguise. Every habit that won the title is a habit I now use on sales calls for Pillar Cabins and for clients at Beiler+Stoltzfus Marketing. Here are the three that mattered most.
1. Decide the ending first
When the topic card is in your hand, the worst thing you can do is start talking about the topic. The best thing you can do is decide what you want the judges to believe when you sit down, and then build backward from that.
Sales calls work the same way. Before I pick up the phone, I write down one sentence: what do I want this person to agree to by the end of the call? Sometimes it is a tour. Sometimes it is a second call with their spouse. Sometimes it is just permission to send a quote. If I can't write that sentence, I'm not ready to call.
Once you have the ending, the middle gets easy. Every question you ask and every piece of information you share is either moving toward that ending or it's noise.
2. Structure is what people hear
Judges in impromptu speaking are listening for structure before they're listening for content. A speech with three clear points and clean transitions beats a speech with better ideas and no spine. The audience can only follow what they can hold in their head.
Buyers are the same. A park model home is a big purchase and the buyer has forty questions. If I let the call wander through all forty, they hang up more confused than when they called. If I say, "There are really three things that decide whether this works for you: the site, the model, and the timeline. Let's take them one at a time," they relax. They can see the shape of the conversation. They trust that I've done this before.
Structure also keeps you honest. It's hard to oversell when you've told someone upfront what you're going to cover.
3. Silence is not a problem
In the prep room at nationals you learn fast that filler kills you. "Um" and "like" and "so basically" read as nerves, and nerves read as not knowing what you're talking about. The fix is to let the pause sit. Say the sentence, stop, breathe, say the next one.
On a sales call, silence does something even better: it gets the other person to talk. I used to fill every gap because I was afraid the buyer would lose interest. Now I ask a question and wait. The first answer is usually polite. The second answer, the one that comes after a few seconds of quiet, is usually the real one. That's where you find out the actual budget, the actual objection, and the actual decision maker.
What didn't carry over
Speaking competitions reward polish. Sales calls punish it. If I sound rehearsed on the phone, people assume I'm reading a script and they put their guard up. So the delivery has to loosen even while the structure stays tight. Plain words, normal pace, real reactions.
The other thing competitions don't teach is follow up. A speech ends when you sit down. A sales conversation ends when the deal closes or dies, and most of the work happens after the first call. Nobody gives out trophies for the fourth polite email, but that's usually the one that gets the tour booked.
If you want to get better at this
You don't need a national conference. Pick a topic, set a timer for four minutes, and talk out loud with your phone recording. Listen back. Count the filler words. Check whether you had a clear ending. Do it ten times. It's uncomfortable and it works, and the next time you're on a call and a buyer asks a question you didn't expect, you'll have a structure to fall back on instead of a panic.