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Do you want an exciting and financially rewarding career? A successful graduate career in sales will give you the opportunity to earn a top salary and you could easily find yourself making your way into the boardroom.
If that’s not enough, you can take advantage of travel opportunities and gain professional qualifications along the way.
Graduate jobs in sales
Sales professionals are all-round business people who use their problem-solving skills to understand, anticipate and meet customers’ needs.
Modern sales professionals now act as business consultants to their clients, and their role involves selling one or more of their products or services to customers including individual clients, organisations, government departments and global businesses.
Sales is rooted in the here-and-now, and driven very much by immediate results. So an optimistic and positive attitude to life is always a plus for a salesperson – you need to be the sort of person who can convince both your employer and your customer that things can only get better.
At the same time, and contrary to popular myth, salespersons need to be very honest about themselves, their company and their products.
Graduate-job descriptions
Business-to-business sales
Most sales activity, above the level of shop assistant, is in the business-to-business arena, and so gives considerable scope for graduates in a multitude of disciplines.
Salespeople for capital goods, for example, will often have an engineering background, and pharmaceutical companies employ people trained in medicine or biochemistry.
Such specialisms usually attract higher starting salaries than general sales. A good understanding of the product – and your clients' needs – is important. Not only is this essential in making the sale, but you will often be the first point of contact if something goes wrong.
Export sales is an important area, and language skills and an understanding of different cultures are important. Despite modern technology, travel is still involved, so you need to be willing to live out of a suitcase for extended periods, and identify your own strategies, opportunities and contacts, often with minimal support.
Succeeding in sales
Interpersonal relations are vital – you need to be able to strike a rapport with your clients. There are 'born' salespeople, and many employers use psychometric testing to try to identify desirable character traits. However, most of a salesperson's skills can be learned.
The most important skills are initiative, self-confidence and integrity. An understanding of your company’s wider perspective is also important.
Starting out in sales
It is difficult to generalise about salaries. Except in the initial training phase, most salespeople will be remunerated at least partly on results, and quite a few salespeople work on a commission-only basis.
Job adverts will often quote ’OTE’ (on-target earnings), but only a small proportion of this may be guaranteed. Problems may also arise when commission is shared around a sales team – make sure you know how this works and what you can expect in advance.
