My short story about how I found the B2B Sales Profession.
Isaac Wadick
One of the great first world challenges is figuring out what on earth do I do with my career? There is a reason why the statistics show the average person changes careers (not jobs) 6 times in their lifetime. Sure, there are many different personality types and some people actually do embrace change, but for the majority of people I have spoken with, career changes are driven by running from something that doesn’t fit, rather than proactively going after something they have a strong sense will be better suited to what they want to get out of life.
From my experience, it’s the sheer lack of education and access to information about what you actually do in the day-to-day of a job that is the challenge when making these life altering decisions. The more mainstream career options are easier to figure out, as you usually have had an experience with a teacher, nurse, doctor, police officer, retail sales consultant, etc, by the time you finish high school. However even these experiences are a small fraction of what these professionals involve in their day-today activities. A salient example of a career that very few people consider as an occupation is B2B (business to business) sales, or ‘Corporate Sales.’ To add to the confusion around this career path, many have had experiences with retail sales consultants, real estate agents, door to door sales folk, car salespeople etc. It’s by means a crticisme on the business to consumer (B2C) sales profession, as it requires its own unique skillset, but despite some of the skills being transferrable, the B2B space is a different world.
The ultimate conundrum surrounding this profession is that there are next to no tertiary qualifications that exist in this area, which is staggering. So, when you are ending high school and trying to figure out if you want to pursue additional education (or go straight into fulltime work), you analyse all the options presented to you by Universities, Colleges, Tafes, etc, and does anyone see B2B sales as an option? Or even an option to major in as part of a business degree for example. It’s still very uncommon. And even when it is offered, you can be sure there was no introduction to what this career actually looks like in practice as part of a unit in high school, so who is going to choose this option when they have no idea what on earth it really entails?
The Sales Function of a business is ultimately responsible for growing the businesses’ revenue, which keeps everyone in a job. Now I am probably a tad bias here, as every function in a business plays an integral part to how a business operates, but in layman’s terms, if you don’t sell more stuff, you don’t grow. And if you don’t grow, you risk letting your competitors swallow up your market share, hence your revenue declines to the point where you risk going out of business. It’s not rocket science once you have worked in the corporate world for a few seasons. Admittedly many business models rely on referrals and online purchasing which is driven by effective marketing and customers’ experiences. But if you sell another product or service to a business (not a retail customer), you will have an uphill battle succeeding without an effective Sales Team. There are always exceptions to the rule. Atlassian, one of the most successful ever Aussie tech companies grew their business organically by ‘word-of-mouth’ to a billion dollar empire at break neck speeds. There were many unique nuances to how they achieved this which are near impossible to replicate with most products & services offered by businesses. However, even they have recently pivoted to deploying a sales team, as at some point ‘word of mouth’ only took them so far, and they were losing market share to competitors who were able to win business off them through effective selling.
The B2B Sale Profession is one I fell into by accident. Like many I had no idea what I wanted to do when I finished school. I will never forget completing a multiple-choice personality survey in year 11 that told me my only real option was a career in sports & recreation (whatever that actually meant at the time). I had a 62% match to this potential career ‘area’ and nothing else over 30%. How deflating. So, if I couldn’t get my professional football career off the ground, one of which I had dreamt about from a young age, (but also realistically understood the odds don’t’ stack up here and I probably wasn’t quite good enough), what would I do after school finished? So, after speaking to my parents, the career councilor, doing work experience at Fox Sports in year 10, and perusing through the plethora of degree options listed by the many Universities I was considering, I landed on a double degree in Arts/Commerce. Why? Because they seemed like the two broadest degrees available that would provide me the time to figure out what my calling in life was.
Although I did end up getting a fairly high score in my HSC (year 12 tests) to get me into this course At Sydney Uni, I really enjoyed the process of studying subjects that I didn’t believe would help me in life. Although in retrospect, I respect the process of studying, learning to write articulately and being disciplined in achieving high marks built a foundation for my success in sales. Not that I ever was a high achiever in my time at Uni.
I was fortunate to have a close friend I played a lot of football with who worked at Amber Tiles. I took a part time job just before I started University driving a forklift in the yard at one of the retail stores to pay for my university lifestyle. When one of the retail sales consultants left a few months into working there, an opportunity opened up to take on a few more days by learning to sell the array of Tiles, Stone, Pavers, Retaining Walls, Fake Grass to families renovating or building their home, or the tradespeople delivering the projects. I was a Uni student desperate for extra cash, so I took it on. It was daunting having to talk to random people all day about products you knew very little about, in which they needed an expert to guide them. I quickly began enjoying the process of helping people make long term decisions about something they would experience every day in their house. I took it upon myself to learn as much as I could about the products and how they were applied. It was satisfying to help people and make a little bit of commission on top of your modest hourly rate, just for doing your job. I then remember thinking to myself, if I could learn to talk to anyone about anything at any time, that would be a life skill I wanted to have for life. My passion for Sales was born.
After almost 5 years at Amber and a promotion to their Head Office store in another Sales role, I discovered that to really evolve my Sales career & skills, I needed to get into the B2B space. With no experience in this area (and my degree not completed as of yet), I applied for who knows how many jobs. Eventually one of the recruiters got me in for an interview for a job I applied for selling vacuum cleaners to retails stores (that sounded pretty cool). They then sold me the job of working for their firm as a recruiter, which I jumped at. Making between 80-100 cold calls a day for the first year of your B2B sales career is the most brutal learning curve. And although it was undoubtedly the hardest year of my career, it was the one that set me up for all my future success and measured that I actually wanted to be on this career path.
The company was a revolving door though, this wasn’t for everybody, that’s for sure. From here I progressed into the lucrative and often labelled ‘glamorous’ tech space, where I spent 8 years across some of the largest tech giants on the planet, learning the craft of selling complex technology to solve sa variety of business problems. There were many tough months, quarters and even years. I endured personal challenges at the time with mental health, threats of job loss, a forced redundancy and a few difficult leaders (who cared way more about how much money you could make them rather than how they could help and develop me). Although it’s paramount to mention that I was fortunate to have many inspirational leaders who played pivotal roles in my development and success. Many of their philosophies still play in my head like a soothing classical rock song, when I encounter certain situations in sales processes to date. Their legacies and teachings live long in my mind.
Through these experiences I developed a deep passion for the art of what I was doing. The life skills I was learning along the way and the being able to deliver measurable value to people and businesses was immensely satisfying. And the money on offer if you were successful in this career was the cherry on top.
I then fulfilled the next aspiration in my career when I landed a Leadership role at a property data & services business, where I discovered my passion for coaching and help others become successful Sales Professionals.
I never ended up finishing my degree. After I had my first very successful year in Technology Sales, I decided that I didn’t need that piece of paper. It was one of the toughest decisions I have had to make, as it brought about so much self-imposed shame at the time. But University style education didn’t interest me. I learnt far more working consulting with other businesses then I had learnt in the 3 years I had completed of my degree. I had wasted enough money by this point too. Time to cut my losses and forge my own path, not reliant a tertiary education just to get a foot in the door.
As you can see, like many in the B2B sales profession, it found me rather than the other way. I consider myself eternally fortunate for this. This doesn’t have to be the world going forward for others who may be highly suited to this career path, while it sits in a blind spot for them.