How Did I Get Here?
In 1980, I had just passed my qualifying oral exams for my doctorate in microbiology. Ahead of me loomed 6 months of working in a small windowless room, refining my piles of research into an acceptable dissertation. Somehow, I was uninspired by the prospect.
That night, I lost even more of my motivation when I opened the Journal of Bacteriology and looked at the postdoctoral positions listed in the back. The salaries were between $8,000 and $11,000 per year, barely living wages, even for an ex-grad student used to living on the financial edge. Two days later, while I was still stewing over my impending fate, a friend called and told me that a small chemistry laboratory in the San Francisco Bay area was looking for a lab manager and paying $18,000 a year. I walked away from the dissertation, and never regretted it.
I spent 1 year with that first company. When it went bankrupt, I jumped to its largest competitor, again as lab manager, for a 50 % increase in salary. I lasted there for 5 years and then was "laid off." (Actually, I was fired because I was in the wrong political camp during a power shift. Oh, well.) I noticed that the only people not canned were the salespeople! When I asked why, I was told, "they're too valuable to lose-they are the ones bringing in all the money!" The point was well taken.
I quickly began looking for a sales job, but was repeatedly told, "You're too smart, you'll talk over people's heads; you have no experience; Technical types can't do sales, they're too arrogant, they lack the common touch; and how do you know you can do sales, anyway?" All were valid questions.
I started looking for a company that would train me to do sales, one that specifically advertised "no experience needed." I expected to take a drop in salary at first-and I certainly did. In 1984, I went from $50,000 per year to $35,000 per year, and gave up a company car. But, I did learn to do outside sales, and found that I loved it.
I loved the freedom of making my own hours; I loved the challenge of selling something technical to other techno-weenies like myself; and I loved winning. Losing was no great shakes, but I soon learned not to dwell on the losses-they would be wins next time, I decided. I also loved the money; the sales people are often some of the highest paid people in a company. And rightly so-they are the main funnel for cash into the business. Of course, the other employees are equally valuable. But, frankly, they are not perceived as such by the people making most of the salary decisions. The job security is excellent-why would you lay off someone bringing in roughly 10 to 20 times their gross salary every year? (And, by the way, this is a good rule of thumb for a salesperson to calculate what they should be earning-figure you need to sell 10 to 20 times what you make in gross salary, including all benefits and perqs.)
I didn't sell anything high tech in that first sales job; in fact, I sold some pretty disgusting stuff (industrial maintenance chemicals used for exciting applications such as cleaning grease traps for French fry machines at McDonalds). But I got good at it by paying attention, working 14 hours a day, reading all the company literature that no one else reads, and doing a lot of planning and strategizing before I left the house every morning.
So, I learned to do sales, lasted one and a half years, and jumped into a technical sales job in another company working in a technical field environmental laboratory services. I wanted to sell something interesting and sell to more intellectually challenging clients than those buying cleaning solutions. I immediately jumped back to $50,000, got a company car again, and was selling something high tech, way cool, and was feeling good.
Let's face it-you didn't sit in school for 16 to 24 years to be satisfied selling non-tech stuff. That's a commodity market, and doesn't challenge you, nor does it really utilize all those cool resources you've accrued over the years. Selling technically interesting things (or services, or whatever) forces you to use your brain, draw on all the knowledge you've accumulated, and be there all the time.
A technical degree (or two, or three) gives you two distinct advantages over the other salespeople in your field. First, it teaches you to think on your feet, to look at loads of information and identify the salient components needed to answer the clients' questions, and to distinguish between useful and garbage information. Second, most of your competition is hiring sales reps with nontechnical backgrounds, who sell by the "Hey, buddy, how about them Niners?" technique. While this approach can work in certain settings, most clients buying pharmaceuticals, laboratory services, or some other specialized service will be greatly annoyed by it. Few, if any, of my clients want to talk about the big game.
When a client asks me a technical question, I don't have to say, "I don't know; I'll have to ask someone smart and get back to you." Instead I say, "Sure, you can pick up phenols in a standard GCMS scan; which ones do you need to see?" This ability to grasp the question and come up with a useful answer saves my client time, and often can lead to my selling even more services than the client originally anticipated buying.
Not only do I use my scientific background, but I also use the ability covertly installed in me during school to think on my feet, not to get distracted by extraneous information, to meet deadlines and budgets no matter what, and to make the extra effort to ensure everything is done perfectly.
What Do I Do?
I sell environmental testing services for one of the largest environmental testing laboratories in the nation. My territory includes everything from Fresno, California, to the North Pole, from the Pacific Ocean east to Boise, Idaho. This sounds like a large territory-and it is-but there are only about 7 key cities in it, which is where I focus most of my attention.
I travel a lot-about 3 weeks out of 4, on average. I have learned to live out of a suitcase, and I have learned to enjoy it. In fact, after all this time, I can't imagine opening my eyes every morning to the same scenery. How dull.
I make client calls on both new and existing clients; I write quotes, bids, and proposals; I review contracts prior to sending them to the legal department (so I can spot problems early in the game, and often defuse them before they become deal-stoppers); I help clients sort out problems; and I keep extensive records, so if I'm hit by a bus, someone could step in and take over my territory with minimal hassle.
Part of the reason for good record keeping is that the environmental testing industry is driven by state and federal regulations. Few companies would choose voluntarily to spend $50,000 to $500,000 per year just to monitor their environmental messes. Therefore, the federal government has made it a legal requirement to do so.
Often the salesperson is in the middle of a huge web of regulations, requirements, suggestions, and just plain field realities that need to be sorted out, coordinated, and pulled back together to make the project work. Which regulations apply first? How do you meet the needs of multiple regulators, field personnel, accountants, engineers, lab people, and still keep everyone playing nice with each other? The case can be made that this is not the salesperson's problem. Fine, I agree... Of course, then nothing gets done, or it gets done wrong, or the client is unhappy, the regulator is unhappy, and you're in trouble. So, let's rethink this. Whose responsibility is it to make sure everything goes well? Yours.
And you're handling problems from both sides; your company (those wonderful folks that say to you, "You sell it, we'll take care of making it; doing it; designing it; implementing it") have been known to let you down ("gee, it was my day off... I don't know where the fax went, but I never got it... well, we've been very busy lately and it must just have slipped through the cracks," and so on. Then you are in the unenviable position of selling the problem to the client ("No, it's not really a problem, it's an opportunity for personal growth").
