The Career Nobody Talks About
Plus copywriting and a Challenging word...
Welcome to the Official Newsletter of Salesman Summer, hitting your inbox every Monday
This week The LionGlass and I took the mic again for a classic conversation riffing on how sales isn’t just a ‘job’ but a ticket to freedom - if you play the game right.
We also touched on something quite amazing we’re launching very soon…
Not Just ‘High Ticket’ or High Tech
If your only exposure to sales was people bragging about their income on Twitter you’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s only two paths in this industry: selling ‘high ticket’ coaching offers or working at a major tech firm slinging highly complex SaaS deals.
Truth is that there’s a lot of different paths.
There’s your traditional corporate tech or insurance roles. Exciting but risky start-up roles (as I spoke about in last week’s email). And yes you can get on a great info product offer and print too.
But you already know about all of these.
Something that’s not spoken about enough is regional sales roles - being a company’s ‘man in the area’. It’s how LionGlass and I both got started in this game and if you don’t want to up sticks and move to London or New York it can be a great choice.
"You don't have to move to a city to do sales. If you’re bright, driven, and presentable, there’s actually often less competition in more remote areas."
Whilst the Big Logo game with an office in Dallas may seem attractive to some, there’s a lot to be said for the road lifestyle as well if you’re younger and not too tied down. Company car, an expense account, international travel, hotel rooms and restaurants all paid for you. Really suits those with a wanderlust.
I started in Medical Device sales and it really was the making of me, driving around the UK talking to high-status doctors all day gets rid of any ‘fear to pitch’ very quickly.
I was 24, walking into hospitals to pitch new techniques to 62-year-old surgeons who had written papers on the procedures. And I was telling them they were doing it wrong.
How’s that for frame control?
Industry is Everything
Thing is - everything you ever see in day to day life had a salesperson behind it at some point. Every brick, every traffic cone, every desk, every pen. The breath of industries you can work in as a salesperson is near endless.
Which is why you need to pick carefully.
A lot of the reasons that sales gets a bad rep is the image of the 40 year old account manager, stuck on a £40-60k comp plan for the last few years never able to grow. And this is a totally true reality for some.
Fact is, for some industries there simply isn’t much money left over to pay salespeople.
Take FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods - food and consumables) for example. It’s one of the largest industries in the world but often exists on profit margins of only 1-4% or less. This means that a salesperson can shift millions of pounds worth of product, and there's still not much left over to pay them.
Compare this to high-margin industries like energy and SaaS which can afford to pay handsomely. LionGlass had a lot to say here about the energy industry in particular.
The takeaway is to think seriously about where a career can take you as entry level roles often pay around the same, but a huge divergence in total compensation often shows up after a while.
This is another reason why so many are attracted to the high-risk start up game, a huge amount of money is on the table for the sales team as early stage companies sometimes aren’t even trying to make a profit at all.
"In the first year or so of my last role, we lost money on a net basis every single month despite a sales team firing on all cylinders. I'm talking £30K-£75K down at end of month. But I bought a new house off the commissions. Investors didn’t care about the margins because we were scaling."
That’s the trade. High risk, high reward.
Copywriting = Sales, written down
We had a great listener question from a young guy asking how he can improve sales for his eCom business.
My answer?
Study copywriting. Properly.
Now when it comes to sales (that is, face to face sales) my opinion is that it should be studied alongside practice. No amount of books or lectures will do more than making your first 10,000 cold call dials.
But copywriting is different - you can’t publish 10,000 sales pages. Another huge difference here is that there is fundamentally a right and a wrong way to do copywriting. Sales proper is a fluid art form that relies on how the salesperson uses techniques shaped around their own individual presence and personality to build rapport and gain the trust of the prospect. Copywriting is just words, with the prospect having no knowledge of who wrote them.
"Copywriting is sales, but written down. The difference is you don’t have rapport to save you. You either trigger the emotion or you don’t."
So you have to rely much more on theory. That means - get reading!
I recommended studying the legends - Gary Halbert, Dan Kennedy, Leo Burnett, Ogilvy. Write daily. Join copywriting groups. Really put in the boring work that your competition won’t do.
"You can have the best pixels, ads, and products in the world, but if your copy’s $h1t, you’ll leave all the money on the table."
A Challenging Sale
Another listener question about sales reading materials bought up one of my favorite books - The Challenger Sale. LionGlass and I shared a great chat about personality types in sales and you should really give this a listen.
The book breaks reps into five archetypes: the hard worker, the lone wolf, the relationship builder, the problem solver, and the challenger; we each shared examples of salespeople we’ve managed who fit these archetypes.
"I managed a guy who would bring dog biscuits along to see a client. Once the client’s dog trusted him, so would the client."
Contrast that with another rep who closed huge energy deals by challenging prospects on their current strategy:
"He’d walk them through a pitch and just say, 'you’re doing this wrong, this is what we’d do instead.' It was so direct, but it worked because he knew the market back to front."
But if either tried to use the other’s approach, they’d fall flat.
Knowing your own style is essential- and so is being a genuine expert in your product and industry. Challenger selling only works when you’ve earned the right to challenge.
Make sure you join me and The Lion Glass - and the occasional special guest - every Sunday for the Live Sales Space - set a reminder on your phone - and look forward to a new Sales Letter from me every Monday, right into your inbox.
Thanks for reading.
Love to you all,
The Sales Bull x
This is so accurate… a vehicle for freedom.
Work hard play hard.
You get out what you put in.
A pleasure to read as always. Travelling salesman is a great glamorous-but-not-actually job, just like consulting lol (where I started)