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Did Your Salespeople Choose to be In Sales?

Guest post by: Dave Kurlan

Article Overview: A majority of people didn't start their sales careers right after college. Did most of your sales people choose sales as a career or did they simply end up in sales?

Did Your Salespeople Choose to be In Sales?

Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.

Even if you reviewed as many resumes as I do each week you might not notice this: Most sales candidates did not have a sales position as their first job after college. Most started as something else and then, out of the blue, they were in sales, sales management, marketing, or business development. I always get suspicious when somewhere back in time a candidate went from Purchasing to Sales Management and never sold along the way...

So what happened? Did they think salespeople had a more exciting life/role and wish to become one? Were they given ultimatums to accept commission sales positions as a way of keeping their jobs during a recession? Did they lose a job in their chosen profession and then take a sales position out of desperation?

Of more interest is why, after the transition, they remained in sales...After all, only a small percentage (26%) of them are reasonably good at it.

The small percentage of people who chose sales as a career (if I had a resume, it would show sales as the first position but it was less a matter of choosing and more a realization that I wasn't qualified to do anything else!) aren't any more successful than those who didn't.

Let's conduct an informal poll/exercise. After reading this, ask your most effective and least effective salespeople if they chose sales as a career or simply ended up in a sales career. Then report your findings by commenting below. We would be very interested in your findings!

Your comments might read something like:

"Our most effective salesperson was forced into sales 10 years ago. Our least effective salesperson started in sales 20 years ago because it was the only job he could get."

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Article Tags: sales, sales careers, sales people



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