How To Get A Sales Job (With No Experience)

Your Dream Sales Job

You need to master a lot of different skills to excel at sales. On the technical side of things, managing a wide range of sales enablement technologies is key to closing more deals in less time. CRMs, prospecting tools, video conferencing and demo software—these are all par for the course in lots of sales positions.

But the technical stuff can all be learned on the job. The other skills, the soft skills, the people skills, and the self-discipline—these are the real underpinnings of sales success. And if you can cultivate these skills before landing your first sales role, you’re going to move up the ladder and boost your earning potential much quicker.

Best of all, you don’t have to have a background in sales to get into the industry. All you need is a bit of tenacity, some hard work, and a strategic approach to impressing employers.

In this video, I’m pointing out four ways you can get your foot in the sales door without having any experience in the biz. This video is meant specifically for newcomers to the field. But even seasoned reps can apply these principles (especially numbers three and four) in order to advance their careers even further.

Alright, enough chit-chat. Let’s dive into the four tips.

1: Show How Your Existing Skills Are Applicable

First up is showing how your existing skills are applicable.

No one is a completely blank slate. And you might be surprised just how much your past experiences, both professional and personal, can go a long way towards making you seem more hirable for a sales role.

For example, have you ever worked in retail? If so, you’ve probably had to deal with lots of face-to-face customers, both friendly and off-putting. To be successful in a position like that, you’ve got to have some decent people skills and at least some degree of emotional intelligence.

Both these qualities can do wonders for improving your ability to sell on the job.

Or maybe a past employer offered a service that required a lot of door-to-door cold calling. A summer job like this is great for building up resilience to rejection, which happens quite a bit in sales.

Put these experiences and skills on your resume. A knowledgeable sales manager will understand just how valuable they can be.

Tip number two is where the real hard work begins…

2: Be Happy to Work From the Bottom Up

Be happy to work from the bottom up.

Sales isn’t like other departments. If you’re in HR or IT, for example, climbing the corporate ladder is all about seniority. Who’s been there the longest? And have they put in enough time in the department to warrant a raise?

With sales though, a lot of your progression speed depends on skills. What do your numbers look like? How hungry are you? And how well can you do your job?

That’s why it’s so important to be willing to work from the bottom up. Even if you start in a regular old sales development role, with enough hard work on your part, you can be in a surprisingly decent account executive role in as little as six months.

And that’s when you can really start scaling your income.

So don’t brush off the “lower” roles—they can be a fantastic launchpad for the rest of your career.

3: Increase Your Visibility

Increasing your visibility.

Salespeople need to be seen as subject matter experts if they’re ever going to win big. And that means putting out plenty of thought leadership content to demonstrate that expertise.

Platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter are great for this. The better your content is, the more it’ll get shown to potential buyers in your chosen industry. And you can use those connections as leverage when applying for a sales position.

For instance, say you’ve been writing valuable content about accounting software, and you’ve built up a strong following because accountants find your content educational. If you then reach out to an accounting software’s hiring manager and show them how thousands of their customers actually follow you on LinkedIn, there’s no way they’re not going to at least sit down with you for a conversation.

Social selling these days holds some serious weight. And the more visible you are to the right people, the better positioned you’ll be to land a quality sales job.

4: Jump Into Quality Training

Jump into sales training. And not just any training. But quality training.

If you want to kill it in sales, you’ve got to be always improving. And that means digging in, developing new skills, and refining the ones you’ve got.

Now, there are a fair amount of sales training programs out there. But they’re not all made equal. And some are going to offer you more value than others. On top of that, some training programs only teach you a narrow range of the skills you need to be successful.

That’s why I developed the Selling Made Simple Academy. This training program is designed to take your sales skills to the next level and truly crush it. Inside, we cover four distinct and equally important aspects of sales success:

1. Understanding Your Market
2. Getting in Front of Buyers
3. Explaining the Value
4. Cultivating the Mindset

If you can show a sales manager that you’re committed to improving your sales skills, or better yet, have already completed a quality training program, you’ve got at least an interview in the bag.

Summary

And that’s all there is to it! With enough elbow grease and go-getter mindset, you can break into a lucrative and fulfilling sales role without having any direct experience. Just…

1. Show How Your Existing Skills Are Applicable
2. Be Happy to Work From the Bottom Up
3. Increase Your Visibility
4. Jump Into Quality Training

That’s all there is to it. Now remember, this is all just to get you started. If you want to start raking in some serious dough, you need to be committed to improving your skills. To getting better. And not every year or month. But every. Single. Day.

It’s tough work, I know. But if you keep at it, you can achieve real professional fulfillment and earn more than you ever thought possible, I promise.