Why to start your career in sales?
Working in sales is a mindset, teaches patience, and is simple but not easy. If you have not worked in sales, you may not know that it’s about building relationships and gaining trust of people that make decisions to help their business achieve their goals. Boiled down, that is all sales is. However, to succeed at this is very challenging. You are often reaching out to people that do not have time to listen, don’t want to listen, or are “not interested”. There are plenty of reasons why people find selling difficult; cold calling, rejection, high-highs, and low-lows, just name a few. But this post attempts to show how working in sales can change a career path for the better!
Learn how to become a self-starter
When you work in sales the first thing you hope for is a good leader. I have been lucky throughout my career to work for several sales managers and leaders that have encouraged me, gave me space to grow, and were hard on me to continue to be a self-motivator. As you move through your career, there are endless opportunities to achieve more, but you will not capitalize on those opportunities if you do not do it from within. Sales will implicitly teach you to do this, or you will not be in sales long.
Understand how to connect with business people
This might be the most important aspect in sales. If you work with a business owner, they are constantly thinking about how to improve their business, whether it’s from a cost standpoint, or revenue standpoint, as a sales person you had better be able to help them achieve their goals with your solution or you won’t be in the room long enough to start a project with them. As you move through your career what you learned about attaching value to your solution will serve you well in countless rooms.
Learn how to overcome adversity
There are plenty of failures in every day as a salesperson. Losing a deal and missing quotas are both realistic outcomes when you work in sales. But learning from those losses are often far more fruitful than any win. From these failures, or struggles you will learn how to pick yourself up and continue to stay the course. For your entire career learning how to understand and internalize failure will help you continually succeed long term!
Sell yourself
In sales you sell yourself every day. You learn how to present yourself, how to build your brand, and most importantly how to be your best-self. The top of many organizations are often filled with people that once worked in sales. For better or worse, that’s a reality. The reason those people get there are because they understand how to show their best attributes throughout their career and continue to move up through an organization.
Get outside your comfort zone
When you start this job, you will often hear managers tell you to get “comfortable with being uncomfortable.” There are many things to be uncomfortable with in this position, for example – cold calling or asking a high level business person for the order, but learn how to navigate that experience suits you for moments later in your career, like a dream job interview!
How to Start?
Plenty of organizations hire new applicants right out of school for sales. Advanced Office Solutions, for example, will look for applicants who have a great attitude, willingness to learn, and are passionate about helping people. AOS also puts new hires through the Xerox Sales Academy which helps sharpen not only the product knowledge, but communication skills to ensure you know how to define customer needs more effectively.