Starting a Career in Sales – The Gateway to Any Business Position

You’re looking to jumpstart your career and you’ve settled on a path in business… Good for you! You’ve tapped into a progressive and rewarding field. However, you’re also faced with a broad range of positions. Starting a career in sales, marketing, PR… Where do you even begin? Fortunately, the business industry tends to operate from very humble beginnings. To excel in any department, you need to fully understand the fundamental process of your company – sales.

Whether you specialize in marketing, PR, or even entrepreneurship, everything sources back to sales. Sales may not be your initial interest, but you will perform much better in other departments after you’ve put in the time out in the field. Only when you fully appreciate the sales process do you truly understand all the integral aspects of business. Here are a few reasons why starting career in sales will benefit your corporate aspirations.

You’ll Develop Expertise

This goes both ways. The more time you spend in any profession, the more skills you acquire as you acclimate to that job. However, by starting a career in sales you’ll learn that the more time you spend interfacing with customers, the better you familiarize yourself with the product/service that you’re trying to sell. While it’s tempting to immediately pursue the particular department you’re interested in, you risk missing out on identifying with your product on an intimate level.

Sales teams put in countless hours immersing themselves in their product. To effectively communicate value to their customers, they know they need to fully understand the ins and outs of what they’re selling – its strengths, its weaknesses, and how it functions. If you’re interested in pursuing marketing, you’ll only be able to identify a customer’s needs after you’ve already directly connected with them. If you’re looking to explore the managerial sides of business, you can only truly manage a sales team after having already walked in their shoes. By starting a career in sales, you learn to thoroughly understand the business process, its challenges, and the measurement of success. These are experiences you will be able to reference throughout the progression of your career, or even to the role of entrepreneurship.

Master the KISS Method

Keep It Simple, Stupid. Anyone starting a career in sales will tell you that the attention span of the customer is limited at best, so it’s critical to  simplify your pitch and nail your hook. This is vital to maintaining customer interest, but it also lends itself to how you identify your target market. You’ll learn to recognize who is a potential lead and who is going to be a complete waste of time. These simplification skills carry over into other positions as well.

In marketing, you’re essentially cold-calling the public. They most likely won’t appreciate feeling imposed upon so that you can make a sale, so it’s important that you keep things concise. This demonstrates valuation of your customer’s time and encourages customer retention. Lead identification in sales also bolsters target marketing. Knowing who is more appropriately qualified for your product helps you re-evaluate your marketing strategies and who you are addressing. Streamlining your work to keep things simple is a skill honed by starting a career in sales, but that lends itself to various other departments.

Networking Comes With Starting a Career in Sales

Sales are exhausting. People are exhausting. But one of the greatest perks of starting a career in sales is that you come into contact with great sums of people on a day-to-day basis. In other words, with every person you interface with, you are establishing and reinforcing a strong social network that you can carry with you beyond the position (or even the company) you currently work for. You get to rub elbows with the movers and shakers of the world, experiencing first-hand what influences their decision-making.

These are all opportunities to adapt your thought process, while also strategically dropping your name where appropriate. If they have a positive experience with you, they may reach out and touch base sometime down the line, offering you an opportunity you’ve been waiting for. Beyond the big shots, you also secure invaluable relationships with prospects and colleagues. By starting a career in sales, you further establish an intimate social network.

Self-Sufficiency Becomes Second Nature

Salespeople have only themselves to compete with on a daily basis. Over time, they learn to hone their skills and find new ways to innovate their sales strategy. Other than minor guidance by your manager, for the most part, if you’re starting a career in sales, you have to be self-driven and capable of holding yourself accountable. As you advance through the ranks and climb the corporate ladder, you have to shoulder more responsibilities without the motivation of the higher-ups. You learn to draw motivation from within yourself to boost sales productivity. Starting a career in sales is the perfect opportunity to enforce this. To navigate sales, you learn to streamline a routine that works for you. This then provides structure for you in other fields and hones in on your time management skills.

You’ll Learn Resilience

Sales are brutal, but they teach you valuable lessons that are applicable in any field. You learn how to handle rejection and shrug off setbacks. You develop a thick skin, along with the ability to persevere through any stressful tasks. You master your basic ABC’s – Always Be Closing. By the nature of your job, you can’t take ‘no’ for an answer, so you learn to build social stamina to effectively close the deal. With experience also comes confidence, an immense perk of starting a career in sales that will benefit you in future roles.

Not everyone is cut out for sales, but that’s okay! It takes very particular charismatic skills to excel in sales, but it can certainly serve as a successful starting point for a career in business. Surely you can apply for a job in marketing and PR immediately and learn the ropes through experience, but by doing so, you’re missing out on vital elements of your product/service that you can only explore by being out in the field.

You can only be a truly effective marketer if you have hob-nobbed with the target consumers themselves, learning to identify their needs and how your product satisfies them. Subordinates will more likely respect their managers if they know that they have already put in the time in their shoes. Sales may seem like just another department in an industry, but sales are the flesh and blood of any business. You gotta “carry the bag” and go out into the field to experience selling to customers first-hand. Whether it’s just for a couple of weeks or a couple of years, directly involving yourself in the sales process will provide you with a wealth of knowledge to build a successful market strategy.