Straight Talk for Youth Seeking to Thrive

The Man with the Broom Will Be Your Boss One Day

Not too many years later, I ended up in the sales training business. That became my career for the next 35 years. I trained thousands of professional salespeople all over the world, serving over 40 of the top 500 US corporations.

The perception of the sales profession expressed by the young man who wrote Porter is a product of the university environment. Tell your counselor you want to graduate and go into sales. The typical response is, “You want to go into sales and waste your education?” They have little understanding of how business works in the real world. When I read the venomous tone in the young man’s remarks, I honestly felt sorry for him.

Salespeople fall into two different categories, industrial sales and consumer sales. Industrial salespeople have a limited number of customers and must continue to sell their goods and services regularly. Repeat business is the name of the game. Integrity is critical to their success; without it, you’re out of the game quickly.

The same holds true for salespeople in the consumer marketplace. For a salesperson to make a lot of money in that competitive arena, they must rely on referrals. Ripping off customers makes for a short career.

To piggyback on Ray’s lessons, sales is the best way I know to truly learn about business. It is the fairest profession out there. The more you sell, the more valuable you are to your employer. And you’re paid accordingly.

If a young person were to ask me about choosing a college major, I would tell him to get a technical degree. That’s your entry ticket. But remember, engineers, like accountants, are a dime a dozen. While you may start out with a job and a decent salary, look at the salary for an engineer with ten years’ experience who’s still doing technical work. It’s not that much different.

During my career, I had many top-name consulting engineering firms as clients. The top-paid engineers were the ones who learned how to sell and interact with clients. Oh, they had titles like “Business Development Manager,” but don’t let that fool you. They were in sales and made a darn good living. They brought in revenue-creating jobs and then passed off the technical work to the young engineers in the back room.

A good engineer who can work with clients can keep dozens, if not hundreds of other engineers employed. Revenue generators do not get laid off.

I was fortunate as a young man to have Joe and Ray come along at critical junctions in my life. They taught me lessons I never could have learned in college.

If you are a recent graduate and are un(der)employed, here is your challenge. Particularly here in Florida, seniors go out to dinner several nights per week. A good number of the folks waiting on tables are recent college graduates who grabbed what they thought was the only job they could find.

One young man told me the industry he wanted to work in and mentioned he was hoping a job in his field would become available soon. There is a local company in his chosen industry, and I asked him if they had any job openings of any type. He said, “Oh yeah, but I don’t want them. They pay less than waiting tables.”

I felt my wife kicking me under the table, warning me not to come unglued. I wanted to ask him several questions. Why was he screwing around waiting tables? Did he want to wait until he was 30 before starting his career? What made him think that there weren’t 200-300 other folks waiting tables looking for that very job?

Let me be blunt. The job market is based on the law of supply and demand. If there were a great demand for jobs in your educational field, you would already have one. There is an oversupply of candidates, and demand is low. Waiting for things to “open up” is dangerously shortsighted. You may be well into your 30s before demand in your field opens back up.

How long do you want to hang out waiting tables? Unless you want to make your career in the restaurant business, you are wasting your time.

What the young man failed to understand was that if he got a job – any job – at the local company he wanted to work for, he could do two things. First, do a good job of whatever he was hired to do. Second, make it known to the personnel department that he really would like to earn a shot at a job in his field and that he’d like to be considered when it became available.

If you’re waiting for your dream job to appear in the “Wanted” ads, you’re going to be waiting a very long time. That job won’t be on Craigslist either; the guy sweeping the floors or handing out the mail beat you to it.

There are differences between a job and a career. One of them is commitment. Find an industry you think you will love, one you can see yourself enjoying for the next several years. Then do whatever it takes to get a job in that field, even if it’s sweeping the floors like Joe. Sure, you want to get along with people, but dare to be different. Follow the advice Joe gave me years ago; those principles still work today.

I want to address a sales career in particular. It’s difficult to find a sales job because they want to hire someone experienced. How can you get it? Shoot for an inside sales job where you talk to customers and take orders. Get to know the customers and their needs. Learn your company’s products and how your customers use them.

Most salespeople get their first big break by being promoted from within to the outside sales territories. Learn the business and work with your customers. Then, as Ray told me, “Make yourself so valuable, they have to pay you well to keep you.”

When you look at the current Fortune 500 list of wealthy people, a surprising number are quite young, including a certain young “hoodie” wearing gentleman who started Facebook. I can guarantee you, none of these folks waited around for things to open up. They had more important things to do.

Talkin’ About My Generation

Now that I’ve said my piece, I’ll briefly turn my attention back to you, my peers. Our sons, daughters, and grandchildren face a tough reality in the modern workforce – one in stark contrast to the convoluted ideology of the modern educational institution. An entire generation seems to believe that if you just check off all the right boxes, careers, promotions, and money will magically appear. We know that’s simply not true. Success is hard earned.

A similar myth has pervaded our own generation: The idea that if you put in your dues, the government will uphold its end of the bargain, providing a decent base for retirement through Social Security and Medicare. Well, that’s simply not true either.

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“Man Cleaning with broom brush” courtesy of stockimages / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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