Tech sales is a fulfilling career path offering very attractive development and compensation opportunities. Very often potential applicants ask us who our tech sales is for. Frankly, there is not one single ideal profile but rather several personas are suited. Let's have a look at these.
Tech sales is a fulfilling career path offering very attractive development and compensation opportunities. What many don't know: you don't need any technical background or previous sales experience to get started.
It all comes down to one thing only: having a positive growth mindset. Everything else can be learned.
Very often potential applicants ask us who our tech sales bootcamp is for. Frankly, there is not one single ideal profile. Rather, our experience confirms that several personas are particularly well suited to enter a career in tech sales.
Let's have a look at what these are.
Hospitality workers
We consider anyone working in a service-oriented career to be a “hospitality worker”. These are people that have worked in restaurants, hotels, tourism, or retail (to name a few popular examples). Whether they have worked as bartenders, servers, front desk receptionists, travel agents, stewardesses, or store managers, they all have some things in common: customer orientation, the passion to serve and help others, finding a product that fits their customers' needs and being resilient in dealing with all sort of clients and personalities.
All these are important characteristics that make hospitality workers very well-positioned to enter a tech sales career. Their attitude, experience, and skill set can be transferred to a new industry and adapted to a new set of (digital) products and customers.
Business professionals
This second group of professionals has not worked in a service-related industry but has nonetheless had significant customer contact on a day-to-day basis. These may be people that have worked in consulting, customer success and support, marketing, project management or any role around business development and sales. Regardless of the industry, all these share a mutual understanding of customer orientation and thinking from the buyer's perspective.
Similar to what we wrote about hospitality workers, their experience and mindset are very much transferable to business-to-business tech sales. Additionally, many of them have worked in business contexts where they faced conflicting priorities, parallel tasks and different stakeholders that needed to be managed. This implies that many have found a way to organize themselves and be efficient with the time they have.
This serves as a big bonus entering a tech sales career in which self-management and organization, discipline and efficiency play an essential role in being successful. It's one of the core concepts we teach our Hyrise students during the bootcamp as well.
University grads
Oftentimes young people graduate from university and wonder “What to do now?”. With the whole world full of opportunities open to them, they usually want to make the perfect decision investing into a future-proof career path that offers professional fulfillment, autonomy beyond rigid 9-5 working schedules, attractive compensation, and transparent career development paths. Truth be told, few other careers are offering this combination as much as tech sales does.
In sales, especially tech sales, you will be evaluated based on your performance, not the amount of time you need to invest to get there. How you achieve your goals is totally up to you. With sales being responsible for the company's growth, salespeople often enjoy very high visibility within the organization - even junior profiles. Since top performers are the holy grail to any organization, fast career advancement is often guaranteed.
For university grads that want to learn a universal skill that will benefit them in all areas of their personal and professional lives, tech sales is a great career choice. It's fulfilling work and a great opportunity for career development. Also, even if you don't want to work in sales your whole life, working in tech sales is a great training opportunity and will prepare you for future endeavors as entrepreneurs or general managers.
Athletes
This one is a no-brainer. Athletes, whether amateur or professional, have developed core skills such as ambition, discipline, teamwork, and work ethic (just to name a few). To them, it is obvious that to achieve a certain goal, they need to put in what it takes to get there daily. Plus, it's not just about putting in the work but also about taking care of oneself holistically. Whether it is a specific nutritional diet or mental training, they know that to be successful, they need to prepare and train. They know you cannot always win and need to embrace failure and defeat as the natural process to get to success.
The same is true for tech sales. You cannot directly control the output, but you can control your daily input. Where you want to go and what you want to achieve serves as your motivation. Rejection and "no's" from prospective customers will also be part of the natural process to get to the next yes. That's why creating and maintaining a positive mindset with healthy habits is key to success.
(Future) entrepreneurs
You would be surprised how many people dream of starting their own company someday. How about you? If you do, we can tell you from personal experience that starting your own business is first and foremost all about sales.
Why? Well, first off, entrepreneurs need to convince future employees to join them on their mission, potentially find investors that trust them with their money, and acquire first customers to buy products from a company nobody has heard of before. To succeed, they need to gain other people's trust by explaining from their point of view, why it makes sense to listen to them. All this is flat-out sales.
The entrepreneurial journey looks like a rollercoaster, and being resilient and adaptable is key. This is something you will definitely learn in sales. Even if you have a great product that will help solve many people's challenges, you will always run into some that just don't want to be helped, or may not be a good fit for other reasons and therefore reject your solution. It's unavoidable and a natural part of the process.
Veterans
Similar to athletes, veterans have excelled in areas like discipline, work ethic, and teamwork. They understand themselves as an important element that can only be successful if they function well as a team. Having trust in one another, knowing each other's strengths and weaknesses and that they can fully rely on one another are key elements to success. In their case, this can mean survival on the battlefield.
In tech sales, you will always be part of a team that can only be successful if working together as one unit. Authenticity, trust, and reliability are key elements to that. Lone wolves are only very rarely successful and in any case, difficult to manage and lead.
Expats
Many expatriates have had a career back home and are now looking to gain a foothold in a new country. Ideally, they want to leverage their existing experiences and skills, but do not have access to local industries or networks.
In this case, bootcamps such as Hyrise are a great fit. Whether you have prior sales experience or not, you get prepared for a new career in the shortest time possible with guaranteed access to the local job market.
Generalists looking for career orientation
This group of people has had different jobs but none that got them excited, not to mention passionate. Usually, they have had jobs that didn't allow them to leverage their core talents like ambition, curiosity, empathy, or communication. Maybe they like their current job in which they are working with other people, but looking ahead, it doesn't offer any career progress or development. Often they feel stuck. If this is you, then tech sales can be a great opportunity.
We have seen many talented people from all walks of life being surprised about how much recognition, confidence, and personal satisfaction they get from working in sales. Why? In the end, customers always say yes to you as a salesperson and not so much to the company you work for. It is extremely rewarding to find someone that faces a real business challenge and being able to offer them a solution that really helps them out financially and personally.
How to do this – the craft of sales - can be learned. All you need to bring to the table is the right mindset. Research suggests, one in five have it.
Are you one of them? If yes, apply here.
