6 Things to Prepare For When Transitioning to Sales from Another Customer-facing Role

Many people working in various customer-facing roles are interested in joining the sales team. Sales is a great profession for those who are energetic, result-oriented, and have a passion for communication with customers and prospects. However, the role is also very challenging. It requires discipline, a lot of nerve, skill in negotiation and analytics, and other qualities. I receive a lot of questions - both from fellow Wrikers and people outside of the company about what it takes to become successful in tech sales, whether moving from a different customer-facing role to sales would be a good idea, and, more importantly - what to expect. So I decided to prepare a short list of things to prepare for when considering a move to sales.?

You will hear a lot of no’s

One of the first things a junior salesperson has to get comfortable with is hearing a lot of no’s. When one’s working as a customer success manager, support agent, professional services consultant, and in other roles, the clients are either very positive about engagement because they get value and are not asked to give anything in return, or they’re reaching out themselves. It is very much not the case with sales. One gets to contact a lot of customers who do not expect the call, who are busy, and who don’t want to talk. When sales reps manage to get in touch with them, they only have a few seconds to get their interest. One needs to speak with confidence, be very clear with positioning the value of the meeting, and effectively defuse objections. Growing a thick skin and learning not to take no’s personally is not as easy as some people imagine. I actually know a bunch of people who quit sales because they could not handle getting one rejection after another. The very thought of picking up the phone every day was dreadful to them. If you do think that the outbound activities would create a lot of stress for you and still would like to do sales, one of the first things that you need to acknowledge and accept is that in 99% of the cases, there’s nothing personal when the client hangs up on you. This happens to the best reps every single day. But what differentiates these reps is that they simply consider this a part of the job. And when the client doesn’t pick up, says he’s busy or even shouts something not very polite, they just make a note about the last interaction in the CRM and ask “OK, who’s next on my list for today”.?

Results are immediate, visible and they put you under pressure

In many other customer-facing teams different metrics are used to measure results. For example, customer success managers (CSMs) usually get measured by the retention rate of their books of business. Deployment consultants may be measured by the usage of the account x weeks after the end of the deployment and % of deployments completed on time. Support agents can be measured by the number of tickets processed and the average score provided by the clients. The list can be continued. However, the problem with measuring the results is that they may be quite delayed from the moment when the interaction took place. For example, a CSM might’ve delivered a bunch of excellent strategic sessions for a certain client in Q1 and the renewal date for that account is in Q4. So what would be an accurate way to evaluate the impact of those sessions on retention? Would the probability of churn be increased if these sessions never happened? The opinions on the matter are many and a typical discussion of this topic on LinkedIn often has a lot of controversy.?

With sales, the situation is exactly the opposite. A rep either delivers the result or doesn’t. At the end of the day, the executive team would not care much about a perfect relationship that the rep established with the client if it wasn’t converted into created opportunities and closed deals. Both current results and the trend can be easily visualized and the effectiveness of any rep can be evaluated with a high level of accuracy. That obviously puts an additional pressure on the salespeople. When they see that even though they’re working hard, their peers are outperforming them, it may be very demotivating - even if this particular month isn’t very successful because of the factors that were not under the rep’s direct control. So the reps need to be prepared to keep standing up and moving forward.

Outbound activities are a critical part of the job

In many customer-facing teams, a noticeable part of the work can be characterized as inbound. In the support team agents receive tickets from the customers and process them in queue. Deployment consultants deliver deployments that have been purchased by the clients and the customers are usually motivated to attend all (or most of the) meetings since they paid for the service and want to get results from it. In sales the situation is different. It’s unlikely that a rep would be able to consistently hit the target if she only focuses on inbound activities such as meetings requested by the customers and inbound inquiries related to the upgrade. By the way - I intentionally do not use the word “impossible” here - I’ve seen examples not once or twice when even very large deals arrived through inbound requests and, as a result, reps immediately closed their targets or we at 70%-90% attainment. What is important to emphasize here is that these situations are edge case scenarios and the probability for them to happen every month is very low.?

That said, those interested in moving to sales need to prepare themselves for performing a noticeable volume of outbound activities - leveraging phone calls, emails, and other channels to connect with prospects and customers that have a high growth potential. I strongly believe that the person who is not ready to pick up the phone every day would unlikely become a successful sales rep (but may still do great in a different customer-facing role). For example, in my team here at Wrike, more than 85% of the opportunities on average are generated through outbound activities. And if, for any reason, the activities haven’t been performed for a while (e.g. the person was on PTO) the impact of the lack of them on the pipeline is clearly noticeable. Another thing to highlight here - when we’re talking about activities, we’re obviously talking about attempts - phone calls, emails sent, and so forth. It’s unlikely that 25 out of 25 customers that the rep calls per day would pick up the phone. And even if the majority of them do, it’s again, unlikely that each of them would be open to scheduling a meeting. But as long as the reps are consistent and disciplined with daily activities, the necessary number of meetings, opportunities, and closed deals would be there. Sales is a numbers game, as they say.

Every month the clock resets

This is another tough truth that some people find it hard to get used to. Regardless of how good was your previous month or quarter, regardless of how much effort was put into making the most of the last days, no matter how many extra miles were taken - when it’s the 1st day of the next month, it’s a completely new game. Yes, obviously, there’s a certain level of continuity in sales as well - as we discussed in my article on effective pipeline management, account managers need to plan for the future and build the pipeline not only for the current month but also for the future. But at the end of the day, what truly matters is attainment. No one would praise a rep who has the best pipeline in the team but demonstrates mediocre results in closing deals. This neverending race puts a lot of pressure on the reps. Add to that additional challenges associated with PTOs and public holidays that result in fewer days being available for the salespeople to close the deals and it becomes apparent that consistent pressure is something one considering moving to sales should be prepared for.?

Nothing can guarantee a success

I’m always skeptical when during a pipeline review a rep tells me that a certain deal has a 100% probability of closing. There’s no deal that is guaranteed because there are too many factors that might affect the successful outcome. The salesperson’s main point of contact (POC) might get sick or go on an unexpected PTO. The executive team on the client’s side may put a budget on hold for all the purchases - even already approved ones - because of a certain situation on the market. A competitor might’ve gone desperate and offered a ridiculously high discount. There are dozens of other scenarios that can cause the deal to fall apart or (in a better case) to be delayed. This is why salespeople need to be good at risk management and not put all the eggs into the same basket. There isn’t a situation where a sales rep has enough deals in the pipeline - there’s no such thing as enough, the more the better. So if some deals for any reason would not get closed this month, the rep would still have more remaining to focus on and finish the month strong.?

Being disciplined with daily activities is critical

As we already discussed above, nothing can guarantee results in sales. But what can dramatically increase the probability of good results is being disciplined and consistent with daily activities. The days of members of different customer-facing teams may noticeably vary. For example, a support agent may have a very intensive day followed by a pretty laid-back one. CSMs may have days filled with back-to-back meetings followed by those where one or none of the meetings happen and they would reallocate the time to perform administrative/follow-up activities, etc. But regardless of how busy a day for sales reps is, it is imperative that they perform their daily outbound activities - call X customers, send Y follow-ups, schedule Z meetings, etc. Skipping just a few days of prospecting may result in a noticeable gap in the pipeline, and the end result at the end of the month/quarter would not be as good as it could be. Actually, missing some of all of the activities during the day is one of the most common mistakes I noticed among the junior reps. It takes a certain amount of time to acknowledge the importance of consistency with outbound activities. So those not confident that they would have the discipline to perform these activities daily - regardless of various factors - might need to revise their plans to switch to the sales role.?

As you can see, none of the items above can be considered rocket science. Nevertheless, not taking into account them when considering moving to the sales department from a different customer-facing one may lead to missed expectations, extra stress, and a low level of satisfaction from the job.