The inexperienced salesman
One of the aspects of business that I feel is out of my comfort zone is selling. I always had the impression that sales roles require an extroverted personality. As I consider myself introverted, I’ve never considered sales as a potential career path myself.
However, as most of the people at the startup that I am working for are currently focused on developing the technology side of the business, the business development interns and I have naturally moved our focus to sales. Interestingly, the startup hasn’t required an outbound sales strategy until now – all of our clients have been a result of inbound marketing. As a result, we – the interns – are in charge of developing the company’s first sales strategy.
During the last few weeks, we have created a master lead list with hundreds of different leads, networked with many food businesses trying to sell our product, and developed a commission strategy for the sales team that we will soon hire. And most importantly, we are now designing and creating a sales pipeline for our SaaS B2B model and integrating it into a CRM system.
Stepping into an area of business that is out of my comfort zone has been a really exciting and effective way of learning – I feel like I am going through a short and intense MBA on sales. As I mentioned in my first blog post, this internship has showed me the value of learning by doing.