If you’ve been following me you know I recommend owning your own business, ideally a sales-based service business, especially if it’s your first business. From low expenses, to no inventory costs, a service business is quickest path to money and your best bet against beating the 90% failure rate of most businesses.
If you have your own business keep at it or you’re close to starting one and you have the cash, I say go for it.
But if you’re already in sales or you don’t have the money or aren’t confident enough in your sales skills then this is for you.
How To Succeed In Corporate Sales In One Sentence
If you don’t have the cash, sales skills or confidence to build your own business now, corporate sales is the best move for getting paid and learning how to sell on someone else’s dime. And selling is by far, the most important skill in business, if you can sell you can make money anywhere in the world.
Corporate sales was my path to freedom, I started a business on the side, scaled that business up in my free time
and bought my freedom with the money I made. I leveraged my skills into my own business and I’ll never work for someone again, and you can to.
Ideally though, you do it all in the same industry. Say you want to sell real estate. Get hired, learn the ropes on someone else’s dime, and then go out on your own. You can switch to another industry like I did, but it’s an easier path to transition to what you already know.
With that said, whatever path you choose, if you’re in corporate sales, you need to learn how to survive and thrive. And this is the stuff that most sales trainers won’t tell you, with the exception of my man Grant Cardone. Sales is not sunshine and roses. The truth is, life in sales is hard. If you want to succeed, you need to remember this one sentence.
To succeed in sales you need to learn how to…
Eat Sh*t And Like The Taste
Because you’re going to be eating a lot of sh*t, so you better get used to it.
Corporate sales is cutthroat, especially outbound sales.
- You’ve got your 100 calls a day
- You’ve got people hanging up on you
- You you’ve got people you’ve been pitching for months cancelling the meeting at the last minute
- You’ve got people that won’t sign the contract even after they’ve agreed to it
- You’ve got client fires you have to put out
- You’ve got some clients that treat you well but a lot of them won’t
- You’ve got clients that take out their frustrations on you because you have to take it
- You’ve got support staff that mess up your client orders and put the blame on you
- You’ve got other salesman fighting you over clients
And the toughest part is that monthly target, where you’re 2 to 3 bad months away from getting fired at all times.
And your boss is riding you hard and breathing down your neck. And you feel like no one is in your corner, because they’re not
You’re the most valuable asset to the organized but you’re the first to get fired. Support staff can make mistakes all day because they don’t matter to the bottom line. But because your company’s revenue depends on you, you’re on the front lines of the firing squad.
You have to sell when you’re sick or in a bad mood. You have to wake up every day, put your armor on and go to war. You have to get on the phone and battle. You have to battle in front of clients in your presentation. You have to battle with the support staff to get your client’s taken care of. And you have to battle with your boss’s expectations, because he doesn’t care what you did for him last month.
So what do you do?
You learn how to eat sh*t and like the taste of it.
So you become a shark, never sleeping and always on the hunt for your next meal.
You listen to your motivational audios on the way to work.
You build your business at night.
You get your diet in check.
You get your 8 hours of sleep every night.
You become a beast, tougher than you ever thought you we’re capable of becoming.
Because that’s what you have to do to buy your freedom.
And that’s why sales pays well, because no one wants to do it, and most people can’t do it.
You get paid for your mental toughness and your persistence in the face of obstacles.
And that’s the key, that cold hard cash, the kind of money you can’t make at any other job.
Corporate sales, at the right company is where a 25 year old can make 100 to 400k a year.
And that my friend, if you want it, is your ticket out of working for a living.
With that kind of money you can buy your freedom, in fact that’s exactly what I did.
I used my sales training to stack my cash, leverage those skills into a side business, and became an entrepreneur.
I’ll never have to make a cold call or have a boss again
Because life is a layer cake, the higher you get, the less sh*t you have to eat.
Until you get high enough that all you do is breathe in that rarified air.
You start on the bottom rung of maslow’s hierarchy of needs and move up from there.
You get control of your revenue, scale up and leave the boss and the corporate world behind.
And as you scale up as an entrpeneur, you get to outsource more and more of the things you don’t want to do.
And if you have children you can get them involved in the business.
And they can pass it on to your grandchildren.
And you build inter-generational wealth so no one in your family has to eat sh*t again.
You can make all that happen…if you want to.
If you want to learn how to survive, thrive and build your exit from corporate sales, pick up my book How To Sell:
