Solutions Oriented

Why your first job should be in Sales.

Episode Summary

No idea where to start your career path? Tried what Marc suggested last episode and are still unsure? Go into sales. Trust us - you won't regret it. Let's talk about the benefits to going into sales as your first (or second) job and the misconceptions around the job.

Episode Notes

Today I'm going to talk about sales and why I believe that many of you should get your first job in sales.

So if you're interested in starting out in sales, or you did what I recommended in my last episode and figured out what kind of first job you want, and it happens to be in sales... this one's for you: I'm gonna sell to you the upsides and downsides of being in sales early on in your career, and hopefully get you interested in that kind of job.

[1:00]

When I was in my early college days, my main motivators in picking a career path were related to money and opportunity - I come from an expat family, so a lot of my youth was spent traveling the world. I wanted to have the same kind of job that my dad had... So the first thing I did was look for careers that paid a lot. The careers with the highest average salaries were all things that didn't appeal to me: sports, medicine, piloting, engineering... except for being an executive somewhere. I didn't even think about entrepreneurship at this point, but we'll talk about that topic in a future episode.

My dad's quite high up in the corporate hierarchy nowadays, so when I asked for his insight, he told me that the one job that has the ability to out-scale executive salary was - you guessed it - in sales. My next step was to research sales - really research it - and this is largely what led me to double down on developing my leadership and speaking skills while in college.

Why? Because I think sales gets a bad reputation, when in reality it can be a really fun, engaging and high-paying job.

[3:55]

I feel the need to talk about this because there are a lot of misconceptions about what kind of work "sales people" do. First and foremost - everyone is in some way, shape or form, in sales. Marketing people sell. HR people sell. Finance people sell. Ops people sell. Entrepreneurs live to sell. In my experience, when people talk about sales casually in the Philippines, their mind goes to that "financial advisor" trying to sell you the most expensive insurance plan on LinkedIn, that dude sweating his dick off in an ill-fitting suit trying to sell you a condo in a mall or that telco agent calling you in the middle of a busy day, trying to get you to sign up for a more expensive post-paid plan.

Those are all types of sales people, but not the kind of sales people I'm talking about - they're largely B2C sales people who work on 1% or lower conversion rates. The kind of sales people I want to talk about are the ones that are selling to a more specific audiences - so generally more B2B sales. Business to business, because that's where I have the most experience. My B2C sales experience is more in the context of leadership - selling ideas to receptive audiences and developing them through those ideas.

[7:20]

The obvious benefit: Income proportional to effort (developing discipline)

[10:15]

Teaches people skills and strong communication

[13:46]

Develops a network rapidly, which provides opportunity

[17:00]

Allows you to get hands-on with all business functions - from marketing to sales to ops to finance

This all leads to personal/professional development and opens up more career paths down the line