You’ve likely heard a number of things about a sales career. Sales professionals get to work as hard as they want, get to connect businesses and consumers with services that meet their need, and of course that sales professionals may have the highest earnings potential of any other major career path.
However, there are factors you need to consider before jumping into sales.
Sales is Not a Guaranteed High Earning Career
While you’ve perhaps heard of people earning $1 million a year in sales, it’s not as simple as jumping into a sales job and walking home with 6 figures a month.
In fact, the average sales professional earns around as much as any other average job.
It just has a much higher tail-end potential than most sectors.
The high earners have all the following going for them:
- High paying industry with a generous compensation plan.
- Years of grinding and building a pipeline.
- Ingenious system that gives them an advantage.
Sales Is Not an Easy Job
If you are looking for a career where you can earn a lot of money by working 20-30 hour weeks, sales is probably not for you.
While there are some sales positions that may seem easy, like B2B sales where sales executives and managers spend a lot of time at the golf course, it isn’t all what it seems.
First of all, those sales managers and executives have to do a lot of preparation before each meeting, whether on or off the golf course. Second, a career in this type of sales arrangement is few and far between.
Keep in mind that most sales jobs involve calling people over and over again, upward of 50 calls a day. It truly is a grind for most sales professionals rather than a walk in the park, or a walk on the golf course.
Frequent Rejection
Some personalities are fine with being rejected, some are not. If you take rejection personally or may let it affect you emotionally, then stay away from sales.
Sales employees must make hundreds of calls, emails, etc each week. For every successful conversation, there are ten (or fifty) rejections. Not all of them will be nice ones, often you’ll get the phone slammed or you’ll get a strongly worded email telling you to get lost.
Successful sales people see this rejection as part of the job, and can cope with even the harshest of rejection emails and phone calls.
Have a Strong Work Ethic
Many sales positions allow the sale person to do whatever they want to get the job done. This level of autonomy works for some, but not for others.
If you are not given tasks, or mandatory quotas, are you able to still remain motivated to perform?
While your less successful sales coworkers are making 10 mediocre calls a day, are you willing to make 20 great ones?
You may feel like you’d kill it in a sales job, but day in and day out you have to find the motivation to grind out the more monotonous aspects of your job, and meanwhile be responsible to meet any deadlines required of you.
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