5 Things Working in Sales Can Give You Which No Other Profession Can
Everybody takes a different road before starting a career in sales. Some people jump right in after college, while others spend years doing something completely different before making the switch. Since the barrier to entry in sales varies so widely across industries, it’s not uncommon to see people with all sorts of backgrounds end up in the profession. Similarly, there are people who spend time in sales before moving onto something a little (or completely) different. It’s a high turnover career, and it’s certainly not for everyone.
Sales is such a challenging, high-paced, and necessary role that it can offer lifelong rewards and lessons to anyone who is brave enough to give it a try, even those who hate it and move onto something else. Most people would be hard pressed to deny that they learned a lot about life, and themselves, from their time in the industry, no matter how brief.
Here are five things a sales role can give you which not many other professions can:
1. Unlimited income potential
Let’s face it: the financial upside is what attracts most people to sales, whether they admit it or not. A high-performing salesperson is likely to be one of the highest paid employees at a company, short of the executive team. There is virtually no other career where a person can walk in off the street with no experience and make six figures if they work hard enough (and pick the right company). Sales can change your life, and there are millions of people who have increased their family’s living standards by committing to a sales career.
2. Well-rounded business training
An often overlooked benefit to working in sales is how much it can teach you about business. As a salesperson, you get to explore many aspects of commerce, from market research, pricing, negotiating, marketing, sourcing, and everything in between. This is why many of the most famous entrepreneurs started their careers in sales, and why they point to those early days as being critical to the foundations of their success. After all, as the saying goes, nothing happens until someone sells something.
3. Grit
If you want a crash course in grit, you can train for a marathon, or you can get a sales job. No matter what it seems like from the outside, sales is a grind, and those who can’t accept that it will take a lot of consistent, repetitive work to be successful won’t last long. To be sure, other professions require grit too, whether it’s typing at a laptop for long stretches of time or working to solve complex problems. But sales has the added factor of putting a stopwatch on your productivity in the form of a quota, which means that you need real grit in order to succeed.
4. A better understanding of yourself
Sales has humbled its fair share of people, but it’s also helped many others find something inside themselves they never knew existed. You’ll be forced to operate under unbelievable stress, and there’s nothing like a little bit of pressure, a little bit of chaos, and a whole lot of uncertainty to expose your shortcomings, and allow you to step up and perform to your highest abilities. In fact, the mental aspect of sales is so powerful, that there’s a multi-million dollar industry dedicated to improving salespeople’s confidence.
5. Stories… lots and lots of stories
Sales exposes you to people from all walks of life. Not only that, but your coworkers are likely to have some of the most interesting, quirky, and memorable personalities you’ll ever come across. This combination of factors makes a sales role ripe for accumulating endless tales, ranging from the silly, to the exciting, to the stressful, to the absurd. Even if you only spend a short time in the unique world of sales, you’re likely to walk away with some of the best (and strangest) stories you’ll ever tell. And that’s why sales is truly a job like no other.
