Is Working as a Salesperson Hard?

Disclaimer: I am an introvert. When I sold Girl Scout cookies as a child I took it personally if someone didn’t buy from me.

So, I’ve been connecting like crazy on LinkedIn, and I had a phone chat today with what I thought was a recruiter but turned out to be an interview for a sales position. There’s a pretty substantial base salary (I think, what the hell do I know) and training, and LOTS of cold calls.

:eek:

This is a big established company offering HR services.

I’m not actually looking right now because of the contract job. I’m just getting my ducks in a row for when the contract winds down. My background is in Sales Operations, basically implementing what the client wants once the sale is finalized.

I know you can make big money in sales. I just don’t know if I have the skillset. Do you have to be Hail Fellow Well Met, Jolly Good Pip Pip and all that to succeed in sales?

I’ll use a few examples from my company in the financial services industry. Working in sales is the only way to make really good money unless you climb up the ladder very slowly to the VP level. All my examples are of people who had no sales experience and worked at various back office jobs at the firm prior to entering the sales team.

Person T is very successful at sales and is so successful he has his pick of any office he wants to work out of. He’s a conservative Mormon Republican who got along quite well with gay Liberal Democrat me. He has the genuine ‘it’ factor that allows him to relate to retirees, trust fund brats, or a scared college kid who’s investing $2000 from a summer job and doesn’t know a thing about the financial markets.

Person R failed at sales after just a few months. He’s a nerd and a wonk that always thinks he knows best. He’s the type that started telling the company all they were doing wrong before he knew where the bathrooms were. He went into sales for the money because his quite nice condo and his wife demands the best of everything.

Person W did an average job at sales, but has turned into to be an excellent sales manager. His strength in sales was working every single connection he knew to get their business. Family, college alumni, church, every local organization. Pretty smart way to go about it, I don’t think he has the skill to relate to everyone but hitting the people he’s got a connection with was pretty successful, he’d always be on linked in posting articles about saving for retirement and the man inviting connections to talk to him about it of they’re confused.

I think that’s the thing I’m balking at. Hitting up connections to try to sell them something. I know you take a more low-key approach…I want to meet for coffee and learn about your HR needs.

IMO that’s a better approach unless you’re just in a high pressure sales environment and need to make your numbers ASAP. Building a rapport with the client with an eye to maintaining a relationship is a slower way to close a sale but it also brings repeat business.

You might surprise yourself and really love it. But maybe not. I have always been awkward in social situations where I don’t at least have a passing acquaintance with the other people.

Many decades ago I had a job as a sales rep for a food distributor. It was route sales - mostly seeing existing customers on a regular basis. That wasn’t too difficult to get used to. After some initial uneasiness I got more comfortable and was successful at it - after the initial introduction it was like seeing a familiar face on the sidewalk and saying “nice weather isn’t it” before moving on. My customers were mainly department managers of major chain stores who figured I knew my products better than they did and let me write my own orders(within reason). I didn’t have to be more sociable than having a pleasant greeting or maybe a short conversation about sports. All that mattered was that I did my job well so they didn’t run out of product or become overstocked, that they had any advertised items on time, etc.

Then I was promoted to a more lucrative route in a wealthy urban area with lots of small groceries, delis, and specialty shops that sold lots of our more profitable gourmet-type items. That required a lot more actual selling - as in really persuading a customer to take on new products and cold-calling on new businesses. That sucked for me and I started to hate my job. I had to force myself to walk into the more difficult situations. I started chain smoking and got drunk before dinner most days, all the while thinking about how much I didn’t want to go to work the next day. Fortunately a management position opened up and my administrative abilities got me another promotion before I crashed and burned.

My father was very successful in sales. He also hated it, and admitted he faked answers on the personality test he took to get his first sales job.

In my own experience, if you take being told “no” personally, if you hate trying to meet strangers just to get the opportunity to buy something, if you hate getting your product or service nitpicked in a million ways as part of the negotiating process, if you hate spending hours or days putting together a presentation only to have your client give you an answer without even reading it, if you can’t stand the stress that comes when you aren’t hitting your goals and you may get fired. . . then don’t go into sales.

The big difference between my father and me was that he grew up in the Depression and buried his feelings in exchange for for a more substantial paycheck than he could get in a non-sales field. I couldn’t do it.

There are many types of sales. I hate cold calling and trying to talk random people into buying my shit. On the other hand when I was selling rum I knew liquor stores were interested in buying new products and wanted top be sold so it was easier to walk up to a random person to start the sales process I also got pretty good at figuring out which shops weren’t worth my time because they didn’t want new products just the same old best sellers. I just passed on the sales job at my company to a new hire and sales here are pretty easy since the customers find us and select themselves to be sold on our services. All that’s really involved it telling them how awesome we are and showing them our low prices, now the marketing to bring the people to us is the hard part.

I short the type of sales and how much you believe in what you’re selling matter and can take a sales job from terrible to awesome all within the range of sales.

My dad did sales for a Fortune 500 his entire career. I don’t think he is particularly “salesy”, he is just this sort of laid back guy who people like.

I’ve been told I might be good at sales. I’m generally comfortable striking up a conversation with total strangers. And point of fact, I do enjoy many of the business development and “pre-sales” activities that I used to do as a management consultant - coffee or drinks with alliance partners, going to trade shows/conferences, putting together and giving sales presentations, etc.

What I’m not super comfortable with is the hustle and grind of going out there and drumming up new business. I suppose a lot of it has to do with what you are selling. But if someone said “go find $10 million in new business”, I kind of feel like I wouldn’t even know where to start.

This company is supposed to have robust training. There’s also a monthly car allowance and I’m not keen on putting wear and tear on my personal vehicle.

I only had one job that involved sales, and I hated that aspect of the job. For that reason I believe that one must actually enjoy sales in order to succeed. I could be wrong, but that’s my experience. I’m talking about an oil change chain. As far as I was concerned, I got paid (poorly) to change the oil in customers’ cars. If they didn’t need an air filter, for example, I didn’t care if they bought one. Even if they needed one I didn’t care if they bought one or not. I used to get called in to the office, and the boss would tell me about how much extra BS the other guys were selling, so why wasn’t I. I just wasn’t cut out for it, didn’t enjoy it, and know that I would never make my living in sales. Maybe people can be trained to do it well, but I think part of it has to come naturally.
You don’t want an air filter? That’s cool, don’t buy one.

Granted the company will provide you with all the tools you need to do your job. The question is, do you want to do the job?

Physically, working in sales is not particularly hard, except sometimes for the travel. Emotionally? Literally every person in the thread has pointed out the emotional factor.

Oh, one other thing. It’s not an 8-hour a day job. There’s a lot of preparation, follow-up and paperwork to do in the off hours.

The answer is a solid “it depends”. For me at least, the cold calling part would be a nightmare. A typical conversion rate for cold calling is 2%. That means for every 100 calls you make:

  • ~50 will go unanswered because most managers (like me) won’t answer a call if I do not recognize the number. Cold callers are the primary reason for this.
  • ~43ish will answer and, politely or impolitely, hang up quickly
  • ~5ish will talk to you about the product but not buy
  • 2 will eventually buy

If you take rejection personally, do you really want a job with a 98% rejection rate?

I think that is only one type of sales. I remember when I first graduated college, I interviewed for a “boiler room” style stock broker job. Just sitting there making call after call, trying to get people to buy stock didn’t appeal to me, regardless how much they (supposedly) made. Then E*TRADE came out a few years later.

Following up on qualified leads seems a bit more palatable. Unless the “leads are weak”, presumably they are at least relevant to your business and have been somewhat pre-screened.

Any of those “book of business” jobs like ‘real estate agent’, ‘insurance broker/dealer’ or ‘private wealth manager’ looks fucking tough. Until you get established, it’s constantly networking and going to events and coffee with people, trying to “soft sell” them until they are ready to buy your product/service. It’s almost like you have to constantly be entertaining and subtly marketing yourself so that when someone in your network decides to sell their condo, they call you. I know some people who love that stuff. Some even make it look easy.

The one job I’ve had in my career which turned out to just not be a good fit for me was one that had a sales component to it.

I wasn’t a salesperson; I was one of the directors for a small market research company. But (and this was not really made explicit in the initial job description, nor in the interviews), there was an expectation that a significant portion of my workload was essentially sales: networking, following up on “warm leads” we’d gotten from potential clients, and regularly making pestering phone calls to our existing client base (“Hey, there, hope you’re doing well, haven’t talked to you in a few weeks, is there anything on your plate we can help you with?”).

I’m an extrovert, but I really don’t enjoy that sort of thing, at all.

Thanks, guys. I’m leaning toward not. They do have an office locally so when I’m ready I’ll see what office/sales support positions they have available.

You either have it or don’t.
If you have the desire to succeed, enjoy meeting people and sometimes the challenge lol you can.

I fell into it at 18, working for non for profits and mover into the business sector. I’m 30 now, I’d consider myself fairly introvert.

I’m really good at one on one. Sometimes group selling setting can be daunting. Still possible tho.

the hardest thing in sales is putting up with the general public especially if its a if its like a retail type of job I could go on for hours about that part of it ……
I have sales manager as my second job Im not a people person but my job wasn’t so hard because it was a store type of thing…… I was the labor and sales assistant for someone who sold used video games out of a swap meet and her house …. It was an official business and all but I was paid cash or video games they came to us and video games aren’t usually too hard to sell

See she was physically disabled and couldn’t actually play the games other than to see that they worked after she bought them so id play the games or read enough to know answer questions and bs someone into a sale … I had to reign in my blunt honestly

some one was going to buy a game that I had played that was a just horrible in every possible way and they asked me about it my answer was "that game suuuucks " and if they had bought something else it wouldn’t of been as bad but they didn’t so I got a lecture on being too honest …….
But my one triumph was getting a knuckle dragging hells angel type to play role playing games he liked the beat em or shoot em ups ups like double dragon (one man beats or shoot up the evil gang ect )

I hyped them up a lot because 1 there more expensive on the used market and theyre what I mainly play the thing was he didn’t really know how to read and in his lifestyle he didn’t really need to read a whole lot …. But he actually took a adult "learn to read " class to be able to play final fantasy and the like and would spend hours chatting about them with me ,
He even got a library card to read the dungeons and dragons novels and such… when his daughter visited she came by and gave me a hug saying shed been trying to get him to stay outta trouble for most of her life and I was the only one to figure out how to do it

I have to add last time I seen him he was moving back east with the daughter and grandkid … and the new thing he was excited about was of all things… The original Pokémon games …… I had to laugh as this almost 7ft 350 pound thor/odin wanna be and his grandkid were debating over wether to pic Squirtle Charmander or Bulbasaur …… and they asked me how and where to get a Pikachu ……

So being in sales sales isn’t all bad …….

I was in sales for a while. I enjoyed it, but the other people I had to work with were the most horrible people I’ve ever met in my life. Really ruined the whole thing, Baby.

You just might be great at solution based sales. From your posting, I think you need to sell something that you believe in. YOu would probably come across as “real”, interested in understanding the customer challenges, logically lay out your solution value prop and how it is actually relevant to the customer, convince the customer that you’re in for the long haul and not just short term commission, etc. There is a decent % of customers that value such a service. It can be slow and frustrating starting out because you have to build that customer trust and rapport. And building that trust and rapport can look exactly the same if you are ineffectual at it. Can take time for that first order. Can take a lot more time to reach the partnership level where you’re no longer “selling” but jointly delivering a solution.

There’s the slap em on the back with a gift of gab sales persona. These folks are “natural born sales people”. Somehow their personal magnetism gets the order even if they really don’t know jack about what they are selling or what their solution does.