Switching Industries as a Sales Representative
What’s Most Helpful About This Content
- It’s common sense to know that you can’t convince a hiring manager or recruiter that you would be great for a virtual sales job by continuously mentioning that your successes were due to consistent teamwork.
- Many sales representatives believe that because they don’t have experience doing sales in a particular industry that they are immediately at a disadvantage.
- Just because you come from a different industry or have been purely managing existing accounts rather than acquiring new business, it doesn’t mean that your experience is not relevant.
- Most of the time, sales and sales management professionals have an abundance of relevant experience. Often, it simply has to be pointed out.
Maintaining Relevancy
Whether it be the product or service you sold, the complexity of the sales cycle, who you sold to in organizations, the personalities of the people whom you sold to (e.g. academic or demanding) or the amount per sale, figure out what is similar between your selling experience and what the employer is looking for.
Example: a candidate is selling
- the product or service you sold
- the complexity of the sales cycle
- the length of the sales cycle
- who you sold to in organizations
- what size companies you sold into
- the personalities of the people whom you sold to (e.g. academic or demanding)
- the size of the company you’ve worked at
- any sales training you’ve had that may be in-line with how the firm approaches business development
- CRM
