How To Get A Sales Job (With No Experience)

If you have a good handle on what you’re doing, sales can end up being an incredibly lucrative career. But how do you get started? How do you get your foot in the door? What a lot of people don’t know is that you don’t have to have direct sales experience to land a quality sales rep position. All you have to do is follow the four tips in this video on how to get a sales job with zero experience under your belt. Your Dream Sales Job You need to master a lot of different skills to excel at sales. On the technical side of things, managing a wide range of sales enablement technologies is key to closing more deals in less time. CRMs, prospecting tools, video conferencing and demo software—these are all par for the course in lots of sales positions. But the technical stuff can all be learned on the job. The other skills, the soft skills, the people skills, and the self-discipline—these are the real underpinnings of sales success. And if you can cultivate these skills before landing your first sales role, you’re going to move up the ladder and boost your earning potential much quicker. Best of all, you don’t have to have a background in sales to get into the industry. All you need is a bit of tenacity, some hard work, and a strategic approach to impressing employers. In this video, I’m pointing out four ways you can get your foot in the sales door without having any experience in the biz. This video is meant specifically for newcomers to the field. But even seasoned reps can apply these principles (especially numbers three and four) in order to advance their careers even further. Alright, enough chit-chat. Let’s dive into the four tips. 1: Show How Your Existing Skills Are Applicable First up is showing how your existing skills are applicable. No one is a completely blank slate. And you might be surprised just how much your past experiences, both professional and personal, can go a long way towards making you seem more hirable for a sales role. For example, have you ever worked in retail? If so, you’ve probably had to deal with lots of face-to-face customers, both friendly and off-putting. To be successful in a position like that, you’ve got to have some decent people skills and at least some degree of emotional intelligence. Both these qualities can do wonders for improving your ability to sell on the job. Or maybe a past employer offered a service that required a lot of door-to-door cold calling. A summer job like this is great for building up resilience to rejection, which happens quite a bit in sales. Put these experiences and skills on your resume. A knowledgeable sales manager will understand just how valuable they can be. Tip number two is where the real hard work begins… 2: Be Happy to Work From the Bottom Up Be happy to work from the bottom up. Sales isn’t like other departments. If you’re in HR or IT, for example, climbing the corporate ladder is all about seniority. Who’s been there the longest? And have they put in enough time in the department to warrant a raise? With sales though, a lot of your progression speed depends on skills. What do your numbers look like? How hungry are you? And how well can you do your job? That’s why it’s so important to be willing to work from the bottom up. Even if you start in a regular old sales development role, with enough hard work on your part, you can be in a surprisingly decent account executive role in as little as six months. And that’s when you can really start scaling your income. So don’t brush off the “lower” roles—they can be a fantastic launchpad for the rest of your career. 3: Increase Your Visibility Increasing your visibility. Salespeople need to be seen as subject matter experts if they’re ever going to win big. And that means putting out plenty of thought leadership content to demonstrate that expertise.