Late age job change advice (1 Viewer)

[Judge Smails]

And sales can be MORE lucrative than your current role. Betting on yourself. Less base salary likely if you don’t have experience. But more upside with commission. It’s just about somebody giving you a shot this late with no sales experience

 

[Anarchy99]

What skills are people looking for in sales now, especially computer slills?

This is a very undefined question. The range runs from low end, low dollar entry level sales to high end, big ticket, big money sales.

From what I have seen . . .

- High performance / successful prior sales experience.
- Industry / market / product knowledge.
- Heavy customer facing experience.
- Sales ops / sales support / customer service experience
- The right personality / traits
- Previous general sales experience (but not a top producer).
- The right mindset / forward thinking / open to training

A lot of sales roles have components that involve computer skills or sales reporting . . . but that doesn't mean that candidate can sell anything. Computer skills are apart of just about every job these days. It wouldn't take very long for most people to learn the basic required functions in Salesforce or another CRM package.

Obviously, someone trying to get in medical sales would benefit from a clinical background or formal training in the sciences. People looking for a technical sales job would need some technical acumen.

Part of the reason why I put prior sales experience lower on the list is I see a lot of people that have been in sales and just aren't very good at it. They jump around from job to job because they never meet their quotas. For some companies, that's probably worse than having no sales experience.

Not sure if this is what you were looking for as an answer. If you have a follow up question or were looking for a different answer, let me know.

 

[Anarchy99]

And sales can be MORE lucrative than your current role. Betting on yourself. Less base salary likely if you don’t have experience. But more upside with commission. It’s just about somebody giving you a shot this late with no sales experience

Not really sure pacman wants me to speak for him or about his background, but he was high up at a big company with tons of responsibility. He would have to get a really high paying sales job to match his executive level salary. From what I have seen over the years, that type of earnings potential is possible down the road but not for someone just starting out . . . especially with no prior direct sales experience. I just don't see many companies in a position to take on someone with no experience and promise that person double or triple what a new salesperson could do at max bonus.

Put another way, I work with sales folks all the time, including people that have been in sales their entire careers. I'm betting 80-90% of them wouldn't be able to get a sales gig at a similar pay scale as pacman was at. I would have suggestions and strategies for various career paths for pacman, but none of them are simple and all of them would require effort and hard work.

 

[Judge Smails]

I hear you. Hard to get big sales comp plans without experience. But people with the right company can do deep 6 figures and some make 7