How I Got A New Sales Job In 15 Days

I was let go from a startup sales role on 14th February. Today, 4th March is when I start a new role.

In the end, it all came down to focusing on what you can control, building great relationships over the past 1.5 yrs and detaching from the outcome best I could.

To be fair, the role I’m starting is at a company I used to intern at while in business school last year. I knew they were looking for someone to run their ‘new business’ deals around the same time I was starting to look around.

It helped tremendously that I already had an internal champion in terms of a former manager who I’d worked with.

I ran the entire process like I would do a sale. I figured out their explicitly defined decision criteria and helped clarify unsaid/unrealised needs from a sales-person coming in at this stage of the business.

These discussions typically don’t happen when you’re in a job interview, but I forced the agenda by preparing:

1. A 1-pager business case on how I could add value to their 3 year revenue goals and my suggested strategy for getting there

2. A sales pipeline forecast for 2024 basis all information they’d given me

3. List of OKRs tying back to company level strategic goals that I ought to be owning

In essence, I came 10x as prepared to every conversation as the next guy they were interviewing (a more senior candidate).

The learnings from this:

1. You need champions to sell for you internally. To do that you need to enable them by asking them the right questions in your calls with them, which make them reflect- and also providing the right enablement (in this case my documents) for them to pass it on internally.

2. At the end of every meeting, if it makes sense, suggest next steps. In my case, I suggested a meeting with champion + Head of Marketing and Head of Sales Enablement as that was relevant to our discussions.

3. When speaking with any stakeholders- have a POV on the person you’re speaking to- their concerns, goals, metrics to hit, internal dynamics (this is tough) and what you’re going to discuss with them. This is usually a good place to take help from your champion.

4. Detach from the outcome. Easier said than done, but this is the true inner game that each salesperson needs to cultivate. You need to be ready to walk away if it isn’t mutually beneficial to continue discussions.

   In my case, I was applying to 2-3 jobs/day, cold emailing and DMing hiring managers, asking for referrals from Account Executives in those teams- I had a plan in place to build options for myself. It might have taken a month or so to get a serious offer, but I believe I would’ve gotten there.

That’s all for this post- hope you enjoyed it. Let me know which part resonated if any!