Submitted by editor on Sat, 05/17/2008 - 11:53am.
I once met with the CEO of a now defunct chain of music stores (thank you iTunes) for breakfast. The purpose of the meeting was to talk about my employment options following my degree. He took one look at my resume and said, “Wow. You’re all over the place. Have you considered sales?”
He was right, because at that time in my life, much like many 20 and some 30 somethings, I knew I wanted to make lots of money, but I didn’t know how I wanted to do it. I knew I would rather do something I enjoyed than something I hated, but I just didn’t know what. I was kind of shocked when he made the remark, because it seemed to me at the time that he was grouping the somewhat confused with the nearly always stigmatized sales profession. Looking back, I am sure that wasn’t his intention.
As a matter of fact, the majority of salespeople that I have met throughout my career are well on top of their game, and for the most part make a lot of money. Salespeople are the heart and soul of any business in the world, because without salespeople, most businesses could not survive. Kind of like what happens if your heart stops and your soul moves on.
In my humble opinion, anyone can learn to be a salesman, but there are true naturals out there—most of whom don’t just have the gift of the gab. The truly successful salespeople not only have the material rewards to show for their efforts, but they also have a certain gift that they were either born with or worked hard to acquire. Successful sales people have the gift of identifying what their clients need and matching those needs to what they can offer to the client.
What most potential sales people don’t understand about sales is that you have to be in it to win it. I hear the negatives all the time—“Yeah it was sales, and I just didn’t have it in me” or “it sucked. It was straight sales.” The reason that some people who have held sales jobs have a negative opinion of their former job is most likely because they didn’t stay in the position long enough to see the positive financial results.
Sales positions are labor intensive, particularly in the very beginning, and especially if you are required to generate your own leads. If it is straight commission based (known as feast or famine in the industry), you need to be especially resilient and hard working so that you can see financial results. If you are easily defeated or can’t take rejection with a grain of salt and move on to the next potential client, chances are you will quit any sales job quickly and will not be around to experience the success that hard work brings.
Once you have pushed yourself hard and made it through those tough couple of months, you should begin to slowly reap what I call seed benefits. You see, many sales call that you make may not result in sales immediately, but that doesn’t mean that they will never result in a sale. I am sure that if you were to ask any outside salesperson if they get calls from people who want what they are selling, the majority will say yes. And from your perspective you may think, “Great! Sounds like an easy job.” But what you may not know is that those clients calling and asking to purchase may have come from the salesperson’s initial efforts of planting the seed in that potential client’s garden.
Sales jobs can be some of the most difficult jobs you will ever hold because you get out almost exactly what you put in. If you put in the time and the hard work, you will almost inevitably become successful and reap the financial rewards that sales careers bring. But if you don’t you will almost always fail.
login to post comments | email this page | del.icio.us | Digg this
