Are you in a sales career today, but wondering how to transition into a marketing career? This blog is especially for you.

Now, you may think that as a CEO of a marketing strategy firm, surely I’m not a salesperson.

Think again.

The CEO of any firm is one of the most crucial people on a sales team. They set the tone of the organization, they tell the sales team “why” they should sell, and are often directly involved in landing key accounts.

I have profound respect for high-performing salespeople; in fact, this was my own career before I started Tenato in 1996.

Starting with a Sales Career

When I came out of business school with my marketing degree and and shiny new briefcase, I expected a glamorous job in marketing. The job I ended up with was essentially sales. (Incidentally the briefcase was also stolen!). But I soon learned to love the role, and realized just how crucial it was. I found my stride dealing with all sorts of people, and enjoyed the “hunting” aspect of creating and landing new accounts.

After a few years however, I grew frustrated. My sales career had natural limitations to what I felt was my vast potential in life – two key ones, specifically. And these are the same roadblocks I’ve witnessed in the careers of many salespeople. Here’s what I mean.

Limitation 1: You’re Only as Good as Your Employer

If your employer can’t deliver consistently on the commitments you need to make to customers (whether it be quality, delivery or service issues), it’s you as the sales person who takes the heat. 

Same goes with silly corporate policies that they refuse to change. Or, owners whose bad reputation you cannot overcome no matter how many fancy lunches you buy for customers. 

I remember sitting in the office of a smaller customer who bought most of his material from my employer – he was shaking with anger that my employer’s pricing policies were destroying his business. When I asked my bosses to find a way to modify the policy, they refused because they only cared about the larger volume customers.

No number of “I’m sorry” pleadings to customers could overcome that policy roadblock.

Limitation 2: You can only sell what your employer has to offer.

Even in cases where you have a good employer, there is typically a limited offering of what you can sell. 

For example, if your employer is offering displays, you’re selling displays. But if you sit down with the customer for awhile, you may discover that they have other problems in their business. And there may be a part of you that really, really wants to help them, simply because you know how.

And this matters. Because it means you care about more than just selling Exhibit A (literally in my case, as I was selling displays), collecting your commission, and getting on to the next customer.

So I had a natural roadblock in the scope or breadth of what I wanted to offer.

Your Employer as an Exclusive Vendor

Here’s the thing: If you really are a competent, proven salesperson, you are in the best possible position to leap into any kind of business you want. 

Why? Because sales is almost the same as entrepreneurship – once you win the client, that creates a business in and of itself, even without an employer. If you have ownership of that client (as defined by the loyalty of their relationship to you, not necessarily to your employer), you can take their needs to any vendor to have them fulfilled.

Note here that the converse of this is that employers should make sure salespeople do not have ownership of the client – hopefully not with just legal agreements – but by actually earning that relationship. But a poorly-behaving employer will likely not succeed in establishing this ownership, meaning the salesperson can take the clients in a new direction.

So, if you’ve been doing sales already – you’ve been exercising entrepreneurship already – in almost a more difficult way…because you have a business with only one supplier, your employer.

Getting into a Marketing Career with a Sales Skillset

Now, you may believe that as a salesperson, it is difficult to transition to a marketing career. 

Back to my career development story: After those first few years in sales, I was restless because of the limitations mentioned, and I still wanted that marketing career. But I could not match my skills to any positions agencies were looking for (or internal marketing teams for that matter). They all seemed to want skills more aligned with writing, project management or graphic design. And previous experience was a must. 

I realized that many of my sales clients were asking me questions: marketing and strategy questions – and I knew how to answer them.  This is when I realized that if you really understand your client, and know what their needs are, you can choose to sell them any set of services you wish.

So ask yourself: If you could sell your client anything – what would that be?

Would it include some consulting services? Would you like to sell them a way to boost their success? Their image? Something to really get their momentum going in their businesses? If so, then I think you should give it a shot. 

If you’ve been successful in sales, you’ll already have a long list of contacts to get you started. But how to you get out of the gate?

Are You Cut Out For a Marketing Career?

Now, I have made the case for being able to “sell” marketing services – and in a way, this can be the start of your transition. If you’re not sure how to deliver on those services, you can select a marketing firm(s) to be your service provider(s), and negotiate a margin for yourself.

If you’d like to become a marketing consultant (and there are many kinds) yourself, there are a few other skills you’ll need. Also, you may want to practice by first selling marketing services, and learning from your vendors, before you get too deep into consulting. But for this transition, you will likely also need:

• Formal education – in whatever area interests you, i.e. business consulting, marketing, digital advertising
• Strong written skills (which you may already have via your sales career) to write proposals, especially!

But really, the above are not huge obstacles. I’m sure there are many great salespeople out there who already have these qualifications.

Getting Further Away from your Sales Career

Now – some of you may ask, “What if I don’t want to do sales anymore at all? Not even selling of marketing services?” If that is the case, you may be hoping to transition into a career writing advertising copy, building websites, or doing other marketing tasks. I suspect that if you’re a strong salesperson today, you’ll miss the face-to-face customer time.

But if you’ve never really enjoyed the selling side (and perhaps were not a true ace of it) at least you have the advantage of understanding what it takes to do sales. If you want to do project management, graphic design, digital advertising, social media, there is ample training for these things online and elsewhere.

Build a Portfolio “on Spec”

Once you have some training, you can dive in by building your own portfolio, and basing it on doing work for real, potential clients you’d like to have. If you can handle a bit of sales, you can then pitch your concepts to them. This is called doing work “on spec” – which means you are speculating – guessing that someone might buy what you’ve already made, and if not, well, it’s your risk.

If this still gives you the heebie jeebies, you can pitch your concepts to potential marketing employers – but yes, you’ll have to show your work to somebody eventually.

This may sound crazy, but doing work on spec is how two extremely successful agencies I know got started. They did huge amounts of free work upfront, and then got the clients to buy it after the fact. One successful web design agency I know got started by landing a global car brand by doing a whole website for them on spec. Another became one of the largest agencies in the world this way.

And if you’re not quite sure you have the personality – I wrote an interesting little article here about the “Marketing Personality”.

Support to Learn the Ropes

Some of you out there will want to dive in all on your own like I did.  If you want to do it, buy me lunch and I’ll be happy to give you some mentoring. Why?  Because I firmly believe the world (especially Canadian businesses) needs more great marketers.

Or, Here’s a Little Pitch for Tenato

Others might like to have more direct help learning the ropes of consulting by getting training and templates to make the process smooth, and by being part of our team here at Tenato. 

Depending on your background, you can be involved either in the selling side, consulting side, or both.  We can give you full flexibility to take on as many or as few clients as you desire. And, our established processes and team can help you accomplish in a year what it took us 25+ years to develop!

Marketing Career Transition: Gradual or Immediate

My point is this: Salespeople can make fantastic consultants. You can chug away at your education, and if you want, you can dive in and give some referrals “on the side” (of your day job) to test the waters. Or, you can go whole hog right away and just do it.

If you’ve been successful in earning the trust of your clients, you’re already halfway there.

Would you like to learn more? Contact us today.