Why All New College Grads Should Try Sales

As college seniors who don’t yet have job offers and don’t know what to do with their lives start the annual gauntlet of getting their first real job, I have a suggestion that is broadly applicable and will lead to above average outcomes:

Go work in sales at a Fortune 1000 company.

Reasons why:

You don’t know what you want to do.

Good, sales jobs don’t require you to know how to do anything specific except have structured conversations. College students who don’t know what they want to do tend to go into finance, consulting or law, so your competition is less fierce.

All jobs require some amount of sales skills.

Want to get anything done in a large organization—you have to sell it, so the skills you learn in your first sales job will translate into any job you have afterwards.

Things about large sales orgs:

They hire a lot.

Large sales orgs hire hundreds or thousands of entry level salespeople per year. Your odds are simply better at getting a sales job than they are for any other function.  

They aren’t looking for experience.

Sales orgs won’t be looking for job experience. A lot will privilege sports or club leadership experience, but they know you won’t have sold before.

There’s a lot of training. Way more than anywhere else.

Since they know you won’t have any experience, sales orgs are one of the few places that spend a lot on training recent college grads. When you look at learning and development budgets for F1000s, there are two major categories: sales training, which goes primarily to salespeople like you, and leadership training, which goes to people with 10+ years of experience.

How it could work out:

Some people are naturals.

Here’s the good news: if you’re naturally great at sales, then you now have a job that you’ll find easy and enjoy. You’ll likely be on the fast track to leadership.

A lot of people can get good.

Not naturally a rockstar? That’s ok! Lots of people get good because of the massive investment F1000s put into developing sales skills.

It’s highly compensated.

If you’re good at selling, regardless of how you became good, you’ll make in the low six figures consistently. Sales compensation follows a power law, so if you’re really good you can have a $1m year before you’re 35.

If it doesn’t work out:

You’ll learn at least two businesses deeply.

You will have learned the business of your employer AND you’ll know the ins and outs of your customers’ business. Consider your time spent in sales as a hands on Intro to Business course.

You’ll learn to fail.

A lot of smart college kids have never really failed at anything. Entry level sales gigs give you the opportunity to fail on a daily basis. And if you aren’t succeeding in the role, you’ll now have experience of slowly failing at a relatively important thing.

You’ll have a foot in the door to a large org.

This organization has spent a lot of time and money on you already, they’d certainly prefer to rotate you into a position where you can be successful. This will likely be in marketing or customer success.  

In the end:

You’ll either find a highly paid job, a different job at your employer or customer, or at the very least will have bought a year or so of getting paid reasonably well to figure out what you want to do with your life. It beats freelancing or waiting tables.