Someone had asked for a datasheet on sales as a profession, and with the proliferation of useless college degrees and high living costs, this could be the only shot that a non-technical person has to gain a six figure lifestyle.
What you need: Hunger, balls, confidence, speaking ability, resilience, and more than likely a college degree. Most of these core qualities of sales cannot be taught.
Ground rules: Always be in B2B, or business to business, with the largest businesses possible. Any B2C (door-to-door, life insurance, residential real estate, financial advising, mortgages) has a very high failure rate, with a single digit percent of the top salespeople making significant coin. You can make seven figures in any of these industries, but the odds are so slim that you would be better off starting your own company.
Always ask how big the companies are that you'll be selling to. Are you selling to Exxon and Citibank? Or Al's Landscaping? Which do you think you'll make more money?
At least 50% of sales jobs are scams, where you will be given no tools to succeed, a shitty product, and an unemployment claim in a few months. Ask the sales manager for a "stack rank," a ranking of all the current salespeople, before you get hired. How many are hitting their annual goal? What is the average earnings? If only 20% of the reps are hitting the goal set for them by the company, then that job has an 80% chance of being a failure for you. Look for 75% and up to be hitting their quota.
Ask what the marketing team does. They can do anything from "Here is a list of 100 people that told us they want to buy our product!" to "make your own list of 100 people to cold-call." If you have options, obviously take the former.
The sales jobs that pay the highest on average will be those that combine sales skills with technical skills. Most sales guys are not technical, and most technical guys are not sales-y.
Industries
Recruiting: A good field for any useful idiot out of college to start with. They'll give you a phone and a Linkedin account, companies will hire you to find a specific candidate, and you'll scour Linkedin to find him and give him a job offer. As with any sales position, you can make good money, especially if you are a "headhunter," someone who recruits for high level $300k+ positions. Typically you get 1-2 months of the base salary of your placement, so if you place an engineering candidate with $100k salary you'll get $10-20k. Even though you can make big bucks if you get to recruiting CEOs, any idiot with a phone can do it, it's non-technical, and you're easily replaceable, so try to do this for a year or two and get into something else.
Medical: You'll start out in pharmaceutical sales, with a $40-60k base, with bonuses taking you to 2-3 times your base, depending on performance. I've seen pharma reps get $80-90k base, but that's only with a few years of successful outside sales experience. Pharma reps basically cold call doctors, usually can't get in touch with them, and deal with the receptionist/office manager who is accustomed to dealing with the reps from various pharmaceutical companies. It then turns into a game: you stop by the office and buy lunch for the whole office. She then schedules you for 15 minutes on the doctors calendar where you make your spiel.
Pharma is a good way to make $100-150k on 20 hr work weeks. Drop off a few lunches, stop in a few offices, have a few appointments, work from home, relax. They like degrees in bio, but they are not necessary. Pharma also has a ton of attractive females (more than any other industry by far) because of their ability to woo male doctors. It's a fairly easy sales job for decent money, but the industries glory days are behind it. What you really want to be in, is medical device.
Medical device sales is very hard to break into and requires both experience selling into the medical vertical (through pharma or possibly dental) as well as some technical knowledge on biomedical devices. The hours are terrible: you need to be in the operating/doctors office whenever there is a crucial surgery to instruct him how to use the new products he is buying. The pay is one of the best in the sales field. $125k base with $250k OTE (on target earnings), but you can get up to $500k and more if you blow out your number. Med device is a solid career, but long term outlook is risky-margins are getting lower, OTE is getting lower, healthcare as a field is becoming more regulated and socialized.
Oil and Gas: Don't know too much about this because it's very Texas and oil-cities based, but I've heard you can make bank and most likely requires engineering background.
Finance: Finance is pretty simple from the viewpoint that I'll explain it at. Again, only do B2B. Avoid any type of personal stockbroker, life insurance, high net worth financial advisor, small business loans, etc. The Gordon Gekko/Boiler Room days are over.
If you are considering a career in institutional financial sales (selling to hedge funds, mutual funds, big banks), then you are currently in or have graduated from a finance program at a good school. You already know what to do.
Tech: There are two main types of tech, software and hardware. You get bigger size deals in hardware (7, 8, even 9 figures), but the margins are much smaller at maybe 1%. Software has a range of deal sizes and jobs, but the general structure is:
1. Sales Development Representative. Take incoming leads from the marketing department, talk to them a little bit, make sure they are real and have money to buy the software. Give the lead to your boss. Then take a list, and spend the next 6-15 months cold calling and giving leads away until you get promoted. If you are doing well, start talking about a promotion 6 months in, and demand it a year in. Base should be $40-60k with $70k-110 all in. The higher end $60k-110k would be in a high COLA place like NYC or San Francisco, where the COLA is higher. Don't expect it in Nashville. No need for a technical degree or flashy internships, just show the hiring manager you can hustle.
Inside Sales: You should get promoted here after 6-12 months as an SDR, and you just graduated college! You now perform virtual demonstrations of software to smaller clients, mostly 5 figure deal sizes. You may or may not have to cold call, but you always should, as you'll make more money. If you are averse to cold calling sales is probably not for you anyway. I've seen some $50k-100k compensation plans, but in NYC or SF you should be looking for $60-75k base with $120-150k overall. Don't forget, your "OTE" is dependent on you hitting your quota, or the number that the company designates you to sell. If you miss, you'll probably get fired. If you exceed, you can make over $200k in your early 20's-not bad for liberal arts!
Outside Enterprise sales: You'll sell the same type of software that you were selling on the inside, but just to the largest companies and buyers. Big companies=big budgets=big commissions, but the time it takes to close a deal is much longer: 6-12 months. You might want to get a technical degree, or at least an company-sponsored IT certification to boost your technical cred. Typical base is $90-130k, with $200-300k OTE. Like with inside sales, if you beat your quota, you'll get "accelerators," where the commission rate doubles or triples. This is how guys make $1mm plus selling software. To get this type of job, you'll probably need 3-5 years of pure software sales experience, but you can get it by 26-27 if you do everything right at your previous positions.
Next step: $300-600k Sales director/VP where you'll make more than the average rep, but less than the best ones, and not have as heavy of a grind. You can do this route, which is fairly safe, or you can take a chance with a startup for some "shadow equity" if the company goes to IPO.
If you are reading RVF and cold approach women regularly (I personally do not), then you should have no problem dialing for dollars and advancing your way into a $300k position that is essentially game.
I welcome all questions.
What you need: Hunger, balls, confidence, speaking ability, resilience, and more than likely a college degree. Most of these core qualities of sales cannot be taught.
Ground rules: Always be in B2B, or business to business, with the largest businesses possible. Any B2C (door-to-door, life insurance, residential real estate, financial advising, mortgages) has a very high failure rate, with a single digit percent of the top salespeople making significant coin. You can make seven figures in any of these industries, but the odds are so slim that you would be better off starting your own company.
Always ask how big the companies are that you'll be selling to. Are you selling to Exxon and Citibank? Or Al's Landscaping? Which do you think you'll make more money?
At least 50% of sales jobs are scams, where you will be given no tools to succeed, a shitty product, and an unemployment claim in a few months. Ask the sales manager for a "stack rank," a ranking of all the current salespeople, before you get hired. How many are hitting their annual goal? What is the average earnings? If only 20% of the reps are hitting the goal set for them by the company, then that job has an 80% chance of being a failure for you. Look for 75% and up to be hitting their quota.
Ask what the marketing team does. They can do anything from "Here is a list of 100 people that told us they want to buy our product!" to "make your own list of 100 people to cold-call." If you have options, obviously take the former.
The sales jobs that pay the highest on average will be those that combine sales skills with technical skills. Most sales guys are not technical, and most technical guys are not sales-y.
Industries
Recruiting: A good field for any useful idiot out of college to start with. They'll give you a phone and a Linkedin account, companies will hire you to find a specific candidate, and you'll scour Linkedin to find him and give him a job offer. As with any sales position, you can make good money, especially if you are a "headhunter," someone who recruits for high level $300k+ positions. Typically you get 1-2 months of the base salary of your placement, so if you place an engineering candidate with $100k salary you'll get $10-20k. Even though you can make big bucks if you get to recruiting CEOs, any idiot with a phone can do it, it's non-technical, and you're easily replaceable, so try to do this for a year or two and get into something else.
Medical: You'll start out in pharmaceutical sales, with a $40-60k base, with bonuses taking you to 2-3 times your base, depending on performance. I've seen pharma reps get $80-90k base, but that's only with a few years of successful outside sales experience. Pharma reps basically cold call doctors, usually can't get in touch with them, and deal with the receptionist/office manager who is accustomed to dealing with the reps from various pharmaceutical companies. It then turns into a game: you stop by the office and buy lunch for the whole office. She then schedules you for 15 minutes on the doctors calendar where you make your spiel.
Pharma is a good way to make $100-150k on 20 hr work weeks. Drop off a few lunches, stop in a few offices, have a few appointments, work from home, relax. They like degrees in bio, but they are not necessary. Pharma also has a ton of attractive females (more than any other industry by far) because of their ability to woo male doctors. It's a fairly easy sales job for decent money, but the industries glory days are behind it. What you really want to be in, is medical device.
Medical device sales is very hard to break into and requires both experience selling into the medical vertical (through pharma or possibly dental) as well as some technical knowledge on biomedical devices. The hours are terrible: you need to be in the operating/doctors office whenever there is a crucial surgery to instruct him how to use the new products he is buying. The pay is one of the best in the sales field. $125k base with $250k OTE (on target earnings), but you can get up to $500k and more if you blow out your number. Med device is a solid career, but long term outlook is risky-margins are getting lower, OTE is getting lower, healthcare as a field is becoming more regulated and socialized.
Oil and Gas: Don't know too much about this because it's very Texas and oil-cities based, but I've heard you can make bank and most likely requires engineering background.
Finance: Finance is pretty simple from the viewpoint that I'll explain it at. Again, only do B2B. Avoid any type of personal stockbroker, life insurance, high net worth financial advisor, small business loans, etc. The Gordon Gekko/Boiler Room days are over.
If you are considering a career in institutional financial sales (selling to hedge funds, mutual funds, big banks), then you are currently in or have graduated from a finance program at a good school. You already know what to do.
Tech: There are two main types of tech, software and hardware. You get bigger size deals in hardware (7, 8, even 9 figures), but the margins are much smaller at maybe 1%. Software has a range of deal sizes and jobs, but the general structure is:
1. Sales Development Representative. Take incoming leads from the marketing department, talk to them a little bit, make sure they are real and have money to buy the software. Give the lead to your boss. Then take a list, and spend the next 6-15 months cold calling and giving leads away until you get promoted. If you are doing well, start talking about a promotion 6 months in, and demand it a year in. Base should be $40-60k with $70k-110 all in. The higher end $60k-110k would be in a high COLA place like NYC or San Francisco, where the COLA is higher. Don't expect it in Nashville. No need for a technical degree or flashy internships, just show the hiring manager you can hustle.
Inside Sales: You should get promoted here after 6-12 months as an SDR, and you just graduated college! You now perform virtual demonstrations of software to smaller clients, mostly 5 figure deal sizes. You may or may not have to cold call, but you always should, as you'll make more money. If you are averse to cold calling sales is probably not for you anyway. I've seen some $50k-100k compensation plans, but in NYC or SF you should be looking for $60-75k base with $120-150k overall. Don't forget, your "OTE" is dependent on you hitting your quota, or the number that the company designates you to sell. If you miss, you'll probably get fired. If you exceed, you can make over $200k in your early 20's-not bad for liberal arts!
Outside Enterprise sales: You'll sell the same type of software that you were selling on the inside, but just to the largest companies and buyers. Big companies=big budgets=big commissions, but the time it takes to close a deal is much longer: 6-12 months. You might want to get a technical degree, or at least an company-sponsored IT certification to boost your technical cred. Typical base is $90-130k, with $200-300k OTE. Like with inside sales, if you beat your quota, you'll get "accelerators," where the commission rate doubles or triples. This is how guys make $1mm plus selling software. To get this type of job, you'll probably need 3-5 years of pure software sales experience, but you can get it by 26-27 if you do everything right at your previous positions.
Next step: $300-600k Sales director/VP where you'll make more than the average rep, but less than the best ones, and not have as heavy of a grind. You can do this route, which is fairly safe, or you can take a chance with a startup for some "shadow equity" if the company goes to IPO.
If you are reading RVF and cold approach women regularly (I personally do not), then you should have no problem dialing for dollars and advancing your way into a $300k position that is essentially game.
I welcome all questions.