There are 5.2 million salespeople in the US
I googled this, so it must be true
Despite this, 99% of salespeople do not have a degree in professional selling (this is a real degree btw).
So… what sort of backgrounds do successful salespeople typically have?
This email is going to cover two types of profiles:
- Backgrounds of college grads and
- Backgrounds of professionals shifting careers
If you are recruiting out of college, these profiles typically do well:
1: People with any sort of sales experience
Prime examples include:
- Work experience in an “alumni center” - these are the people from your college calling you up, asking for a donation. They’re selling you nothing! Incredible.
- Students who went door to door during their summers, selling pest control, home repainting (College Works) or Cutco knives
- Mormon missionaries
2: People who show high levels of discipline
- Anyone who worked in college, AND graduated on time
- Athletes (this is a stereotype for a reason)
- People who were actively involved on campus - club leaders, frat & sorority leaders
- Anyone who has started their own business, or who was one of the first employees at a small company
3: People who did academically rigorous degrees
In my book this is anyone who’s studied:
- Science: Biology, Physics, Chemistry
- Engineering
- Math
- Philosophy
There are two nuances with this profile:
- 90% of the people who studied these things do not want to work in sales
- Half of the people who studied these things, and do want to work in sales are a bit weird.
But that 5%... they’re really good.
Ok moving on to people who’ve graduated:
4: People who are in their first job:
- Graduates who start their careers working for mega corps with enormous sales training programs like Paychex, ADP or Cintas. Another good place to look is anyone who worked in ticket sales for professional sports teams.
- The Enterprise Rent-A Car management training program. Those guys work HARD.
- Recruiters. A lot of the mega agencies give candidates a phone and an excel spreadsheet. That’s about it. I am very thankful I didn’t start at one of these orgs, because I didn’t have to escape it!
- Boiler rooms like Yelp. This is pretty similar to recruiting. Frankly I think they break a lot of good people who could have been salespeople if they’d had a better support system… but that’s life.
5: People changing careers.
This is a 50/50 gamble. These people either can’t do the job (and they move back to their profession), OR they cruise right to the top of the leaderboard. Backgrounds I’ve seen that have done really well:
- Teachers
- Procurement
- Engineers who want a more social job
There are of course 1000 other places you can look. But this is the 80/20 of where I would start for maximum effectiveness.
If you would like help finding winners with these sorts of backgrounds, you should book a call to speak with me
