Sales as a Career Booster? You Betcha!

Did you see this tweet I sent out last week? It received a ton of views and a fair amount of engagement.

It got me thinking about the masses already in a selling role and perhaps feeling like they're stuck or have no career progression available, but have eyes for a bigger prize.

Sales as a Career Booster? You Betcha!

If you follow me on Twitter, you would have seen the tweet, referenced above, which mentioned via Korn Ferry that of the top 100 tech CEOs, almost 30% of them have had a sales or revenue-generating role within their career progression.How is this possible, you might ask? How do sales reps work their way to becoming CEO? Let's highlight a few examples of what your selling activities will expose you to:

• Financial Operations: Beyond selling revenue or units, in any selling role, you're directly feeding the company new revenues. And most companies forecast their operating budgets to include, and depend upon, new revenues. Your new sales are single-handedly keeping the proverbial lights on while helping the company reach levels of margin and profitability. This will, no matter how superficial or deep, be your first experience at understanding an organization's P&L (profit and loss statement). Every decision a CEO makes revolves around their operational budget and current P&L.

• Production Value: Understand that your position is a cost to the company, and if your selling production doesn't equal or exceed the cost of having you on payroll, you more than likely will only stick around for what some say 'was a quick cup of coffee.'

• Customer Engagement: Customer engagement is the single most important aspect of holding onto recurring revenues or creating repeat customers. During your selling process, you're engaging with the prospect and understanding how they make, or don't make, business decisions. Understanding what's important to a customer, how they make decisions, and what they weigh when decisions are being made is paramount for any key leader of an organization to understand, including the CEO.

• Overhead Costs: The support resources or internal workings of an organization (think about people that support customers in both direct and non-direct ways) are often times showcased during the selling process. You as the sales agent are quarterbacking these resources, bringing them to the forefront to leverage the resource at the right time and place to close a sale. You will learn which cost centers of an organization add soft value and which are hard costs to doing business.

• Managing People: As you grow in a selling career, you'll take on managing a sales team, or leading a business unit's growth altogether. You'll manage the entire employee life cycle for multiple individuals. You'll be tasked with leading, and for the first time in your career, growing revenue without actually doing the selling yourself.

The moral of the story? When you procure new revenues for any organization, you will inherently witness and learn the inner processes of that organization. You're partnering with internal stakeholders that will help you close new opportunities. You're understanding costs vs. revenues. You're beginning to understand margin. You begin to understand how resources can be a direct, or soft cost to the business operations. And you begin to view that business through the eyes of how many CEOs in America operate theirs, every day. Financially. The most successful sales professionals are students of the businesses that they sell. They position that experience into providing education for their prospects. They master the operations workflow, and they make financial (pricing) decisions like a CEO. They have a growth mindset, in both selling and professional development. And if you want to use sales as a career booster, so should you.

If you found this content to be relevant and helpful, please hit the subscribe button below to receive my weekly blast. You can also follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn for more conversation and discovery!