Good sales people are a rare and valuable commodity. It is the sales team that starts the business process by getting an order for a good or service. A sales vice-president in one of my earlier business assignments had a plaque outside his office door. At the time I thought it was interesting. It wasn’t until later that I realized it was truly accurate. It read:

         “Nothing happens until something gets sold.”

Some of the other business disciplines may have some issues with the sales team. There will be those functions that will be at odds with sales. The finance team will be forever contending with sales over prices and margins associated with the sale. The legal and contracts teams will never be satisfied with the conditions of the sale. Operations will have to deal with delivery and implementation schedules that will be difficult to meet. It is a rare event when sales consummates a deal where everyone is happy with the margins, terms and schedules of the deal.

There will also be those functions that will state that it was their contributions to the sales process that were the true reason for the success. The support functions will say that without their groundwork and efforts sales would not have been able to get the order. Marketing will posit that it is in no small part attributable to their research, positioning and programs that there was any sales success. The development and engineering organizations will always state that it is due to the quality and elegance of the product design and function that sales is successful since the product is so good it almost sells itself. It is not a rare event, in fact it is a very common occurrence for any number of different non-sales groups to step forward and congratulate each other for their roles in a successful sale.

The first question to ask is why do you want to get into sales? There are those who consider sales the home of the peddlers and politicians of the business world.  Those peddlers and politicians are the types of people who do not rapidly garner the respect of many of the other business disciplines. There are also those that consider sales the engine of the organization and recognize its role in driving the organization forward. It has been my experience that there are usually more detractors of sales than there are proponents of sales. You need to get used to that idea.

Spending time in sales will provide you with the perspective of what it actually takes to deal head up with the competition in an effort to get a customer to give you money. Too many times there have been senior management who matriculate to the top of the organization from a financial or engineering or product oriented experience set. You can usually tell these types of senior managers because they will usually do one of two things when it comes to sales: They will fully turn sales loose to manage their own business because they don’t understand the sales process, or they will try to fully or overly control sales because they feel they do fully understand sales (without having had sales experience) and hence want to dictate the sales process for the organization. Neither of these approaches usually works very well.

Getting into sales may not be an easy objective to accomplish. I am not aware of any undergraduate or graduate business degrees that are available in “Sales”. There is marketing, finance, etcetera, even human resources, but not sales. I think that fact in itself, that you cannot get a business degree in sales speaks volumes about the relative view of sales in the pantheon of business disciplines. So knowing this, how do you get into sales?

I don’t think there is any specific or defined method to getting into sales, other than setting sales as your goal and looking at how others have gotten into sales. Depending on the type of business, there will usually be a location or discipline within the organization that sales goes to recruit new sales team members. It may have been the support group, the operations team or even the training organization, but there will usually be a team that is considered the sales training ground. While you may not be able to get directly into sales from wherever you are, you should be able to make the step into the interim group that then enables the next step into sales.

Once into sales, how long do you stay there? If you are good at it you may want to focus your career on sales. The money can be great and the responsibilities will be well defined. While it may be possible to be a leader in the sales organization, there are relatively few business leaders who have come from the sales discipline. While good customer skills are a requisite for both sales and senior management positions, the incremental financial, product and business functional knowledge required to lead a business are not usually associated with sales team members.

So if you are not going to remain in sales, and you also know that it is difficult to become a business leader from the sales discipline, why am I recommending getting some sales experience? Sales is the recognized front end of the business process. It is crucial to generating the top line revenue for the business. The best way to generate a good bottom line is to generate a healthy top line. Experiencing sales from the sales side of the equation will help the business leader understand what sales must contend with from forces both internal and external to the organization. It will also help the leader to understand that sales people are not just peddlers and politicians, selling products that are already so good that they almost sell themselves.