Sorry to cut the flow of my Part 1/Part 2 posts, but I wanted to put up a summary from an interview with a HBS alum in sales:
There are 2 types of positions at his company: Sales Rep (smile & dial) and Account Executive (carries bags) - see previous post if you're confused.
1) Sales Rep: This is the individual who just graduated college. Their job is to followup on sales leads (so the customer goes on the company website, indicates interest, and enters their contact info). This person calls the customer and if the lead is “hot” he or she passes them to the “account closer”. The “account closer” is the person who will bring the lead home and truly compete with other companies for the customer’s business.
2) Account Executive: Within this role, there are also 2 types:
- Corporate Sales: This person is tied to companies with less than 1,300 employees. If you don’t have EXPERIENCE SELLING IN A SPECIFIC INDUSTRY (e.g. technology businesses), you’ll probably end up here - especially as an MBA. In this case, most of the money you make is in the form of variable compensation.
- Field Sales: This is a job for the Big Kahunas. You work in a specific “patch” of the country and go door to door (company to company) to sell your service. This job is traditionally given to the guys with lots of experience selling in the industry, since they sell big projects to big clients and make lots of $$$ for their company. As per my interviewee, his friend who had 10 years of sales experience outside the tech sector did not get placed here – he was put to work in corporate sales.
To wrap up this short post, the takeaway is that “you’ll probably be as well off as the slick guy who graduated college and did really well. Your MBA might get you some good leads, but it’s certainly not going to do much for you when you’re a corporate salesman. It’s definitively not the best use of your education, but it may give you a leg up later in your career”.
"MAY GIVE YOU A LEG UP LATER IN YOUR CAREER???" – that’s a tough one to swallow.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
An Interview with someone in SALES
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2 comments:
Being an entrepreneur sounds pretty good, but many people do not know howvery self-motivation it takes to start business. This is an important skill for an entrepreneur, and people who are not willing to constantly renew their goal of becoming an entrepreneur should not even try. Equally important are the skills of the entrepreneur to declare your intentions clearly a deliberate action to achieve your goals and, equally important, the results can occur. Any company is reliable only if the person in charge. Withoutat least three entrepreneurial skills identified above, your company will fail, no matter how hard you work.
Great post. After our e-mail exchange last week I took your advice and put my thoughts down in writing- you can find them here:
http://adamenbar.blogspot.com/2010/03/in-defense-of-sales.html
Thanks again, and keep up the posts.
~AE
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