Good salesmen in high-commission industries like software, pharma, high-end real estate, etc. will make much more than a good engineer will over their career. I had a buddy in sales who closed an enterprise software deal and made $80k from that alone. He had a lot of deals cooking.
I'm curious about this. What does it take to make a "good" salesperson by this definition? Just grit and experience, or some innate and uncommon skill? I know there are people who make millions working in sales, but I guess I'm just wondering how common that actually is. Should a reasonably motivated and intelligent salesperson early in their career expect to be making $200k+ a few years in, or does that take a very unusual level of luck/skill/dedication to turn it into a lucrative career?
Every great salesperson I know is fearless in any social situation. They can strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere, anytime - effortlessly. You can't teach that.
There are a host of other qualities, but this strikes me the most "inborn" one.
You can teach that, or at least learn it, with cognitive behavioural therapy for social anxiety and practice in progressively more difficult situations.
I think there are limits. I compare it to athletics. With hard work I can double my bench press but there are people who can bench even more without ever training. If these people work hard in addition they can perform on a level that's not achievable for most of us.
I think it's the same for sales or a lot of other professions. People with talent can go much further.
I think this is true too, just that with sales unlike athletics, the field is more inclusive (e.g. specialized knowledge in the product field may be more important than absolute speech skills), and also higher populated leading to there being more positions for people who are merely above average, rather than superhuman.
it is very hard to replicate the behavior of someone that just loves being around people. i can usually tell who is a "natural" and who isn't (i.e. those that went through therapy, coaching and the like)
learning how to be around people can't really be done in a safe space since the world at large in unsafe. people will say dumb shit at you. people will cut you off. people will do unexpectedly nice (or mean) things. everyone is different.
the only way to truly learn these skills is to get out there and be vulnerable. i can see how classes and sessions can get you to a point at which one is comfortable enough to even BEGIN doing this (I went to a few social anxiety meetups with friends), but that alone isn't enough.
getting to the root of that anxiety with a psychologist is more effective, in my (limited) opinion, but that can be expensive for many
you CAN get pretty far on the basics though. most people like being around someone that is humorous and makes them feel good about themselves. you can go REALLY far by finding what someone really likes to talk about and letting them talk (while asking questions throughout)
podcasts with interviews from journalists or news companies helped me with this a lot
Oh! I forgot two really important ones: understanding what incentivises people and being able to tell a RELATABLE story around those incentives.
People LOVE stories they can see themselves in. Gets their imaginations all worked up.
Also, EVERYBODY has incentives. Money, becoming a 10x developer, travelling the world, being a better parent. All of these are incentives.
If you don't believe me, check this out.
Remember the last time you got pitched a timeshare? (If you ever went on a heavily discounted Disney vacation, you almost certainly did.) The salesperson working the room will spend at least the first 15-30 minutes setting the scene. "You. Puerto Rico. Corona. Beach. Need I say more?" type stuff.
Pyramid marketing salespeople do the exact same thing to build their downlines (i.e. hire more people under them). They spend 80% of their presentation on how much you can make and maybe 10% on what they're selling (the other 10% is lost to heat).
Luxury brands are THE MASTERS at this. (I would not be surprised if hip hop icons got some kind of commission/free clothing from high-falutin haute fashion brands; luxury setting is all they do!)
They seem cheesy, but people eat stories up (and, consequently, buy product) like no tomorrow.
I know some salespeople today, who during highschool were the most introverted, least talkative guys or girls in the world.
Their success is due to practice both in work (entry level sales jobs require non-stop talking for 8+ hours per day, as opposed to entry-level engineering where there are 4+ hours of quiet time), and outside of work (e.g. debate teams, tea clubs, book clubs, meetups, networking events, speech therapists, etc.)
I had a friend in high school who ended up going into sales and retiring at 40. He was comfortable talking to anyone in almost any situation. We called him "Silk." He got into selling enterprise software and made a killing. It didn't hurt that he grew up the son of someone quite wealthy in investment circles, so his risk tolerance was pretty high.
Handling a shitload of frequent rejection generally well, understanding your clients/customers' needs inside out and how your business fits into their solutions and generally being good at talking to/reading people, i.e. qualities that most engineers don't have. NOTE: People can be good at these things without being extroverted, unlike what many people think (and I thought until very recently)
It really comes down to making people (a) think that your shit (mostly YOU) will help them with their problems and (b) feel confident in trusting you.
As for comp: Most people in sales jobs go through ups and downs in their annual comp largely because most of it comes from commission and bonus. You could make >$1M one year and <$100k the next. Technical sales are more stable since salaries tend to be higher, but comp is still highly variable. Also, unlike engineering where one's performance criteria are somewhat superfluous, sales is a very numbers-driven job. Most have quotas they need to hit with bonuses for every level above that. Not hitting your quota == not having a job next month/year in some places.
I think in any job where you can get a piece of the gross proceeds you can make more money than in a job where you make salary plus profit sharing or equity.
That would include talent agents, advertising, etc. (You could argue these are all just salesmen)
It's crazy how accurate that is. I'm lucky enough to be working as a data scientist, but almost all of my friends are either working in sales or in grad school.
I'm not sure we should expect anything differently, if recent graduates are less intelligent (as a cohort) than ever. [Difficult degree] enrollment is relatively flat because aptitude is flat, and grad jobs will reflect this.
I wrote a little about this framing it as a CS degree problem, but it seems true for a lot more than just CS.
> Can we prove aptitude is flat? Kinda. In 1970s 1-in-2 college grads aced Wordsum test. Today 1-in-6 do.[2] Using that as a proxy for IQ of the median college grad, in the 70’s it was ~112, now its ~100.
> In other words we have more people going to college than ever, but the “average grad” is less intelligent than ever. Degrees are increasingly diluted yet expensive. You can pay more money than ever to show that you are of average intelligence.
I don't know if it is intelligence alone - I would call it 'grit' as well. If you are willing to slog through a tough class and use good learning strategies, you don't have to be super intelligent to enter into a career in engineering. Are we setting a bar that is high, where college is expected to be a lot of hard work? If we do, we will see those in all careers that require a college degree brining in something new to the work place. Maybe it is my midday coffee speaking but we need to stop diluting college courses
Is it true that they've made raw aptitude less of a factor in SAT scores? If so then there's a systemic problem with our training and credentialing process.
Ditch diggers is a go-to insult, but skilled tradespeople are still incredibly valuable. As an apprentice a plumber makes next to nothing, but once you get your time in you can make a ton of money if you have basic business/time management skills.
Everybody poops.
The same goes for carpenters, masonry, etc. The physical work will wear you down — but by the time that becomes a problem you should be skilled enough to be a manager.
I'm making decent money now, but it's crazy how much trade work was frowned upon when I graduated high school. In retrospect I think I'd be totally happy with being a contractor managing a small business.
The apprenticeship and guild systems that states use to regulate them are awful though. Time in is not a great measure of skill and that seems to be a central feature of these systems.
Definitely agree. Time is important to some extent because knowledge is different from practice, but the requirements are generally outrageous.
I've also hired tradespeople who did put in the time and were worse than doing the job myself after watching youtube videos for a few hours, so at that point what's it even accomplishing.
Thanks for writing that article. I'm extremely disappointed in the CSU system's decision to give college credit for remediation classes. As a society we need to really reassess the purpose of higher education in light of increasing student debt, flat grad salaries, and decreasing quality of graduates.
Anecdotally, I'm still baffled at those in my extended social circle who followed a path similar to:
- Graduate high school with sub-3.0 GPA
- Admittedly they didn't "like school"
- Attended community college or local state university
- Proceeded to graduate in 5-8 years (to their credit some may have worked part-time or full-time)
- Study general business, marketing, or a social science
- Graduate college with sub-3.0 GPA
- Graduate with no meaningful experience (internships, part-time work, etc.) in their desired career
- Immediately and even in later years, get upset about undesirable job opportunities and/or low salaries and/or high cost of living
I don't think any of those are bad in isolation, or even in aggregate if you remove the experience one. It doesn't look all that different from the path I took, I graduate community college/trad school faster, but dropped out of high school.
We're extremely luck to work in an industry where meaningful experience only requires a time investment, all our tools are free (or near free) and we can collaborate with other people around the world.
Wait, that's an amazing claim. 100 is the median IQ for the entire population. So the claim is that the median college graduate has the same IQ as the median person. How could that possibly be true?
Could it be that in the past, aptitude was the most clear distinction between college-goers and everyone else, while now anyone that can remotely afford it becomes a college-goer, regardless of aptitude? This explanation would require intelligence to not be too sensitive to income, which might be a false assumption.
In the 70s 10% of people completed a 4 year degree and now it's 35%. So the increased availability of a college education has dragged the meadian of the cohort closer to the average IQ of everyone.
Aptitude might be flat due to current methods of K12 schooling. Just a thought. I don't think people are any stupider now than they have been, just methods of schooling have changed significantly in the last 50 (even 20) years.
I'm not necessarily talking coursework, either -- how students are treated is very different.
I feel like an apt title for a book about late-stage capitalism would be "A Society of Salespeople".
With that said, I'm not exactly sure what type of career path somebody studying, say, political science could embark on -- it seems to me that there's a lot more demand for accreditation in certain fields than there is demand for actual practitioners.
Napoleon once referred to England as an "island of shopkeepers".
Computers are getting better at sales. Amazon doesn't have salespeople. Retailers barely have salespeople any more. Outside of real estate, cars, and financial products, what B2C companies do?
>Outside of real estate, cars, and financial products, what B2C companies do?
Declining for sure, but high ticket B2C still has salespeople.
Home improvement, cosmetic surgery, cosmetic dentistry, vocational education, timeshares, boats, recreational vehicles, insurance, furniture, solar energy, hot tubs, pool tables, pianos, etc.
And a lot of stuff at the low end, home based seller angle...beauty, vacuum cleaners, organic, supplements , diets, and so forth.
There's still a lot of salespeople, they're just not a lot that individual citizens have to interact with everyday, usually.
Selling to businesses, for example, pretty much requires salespeople. For example, I know someone in corporate real estate, and you wouldn't believe the type of shit the salespeople get away with there or how ridiculous their compensation is (especially compared to her, who does just as much work trying to win business when putting together the proposals those salespeople present).
> With that said, I'm not exactly sure what type of career path somebody studying, say, political science could embark on
I'm not so sure it matters. Even in engineering, college courses alone won't provide you with a worthwhile resume. In college, you have plenty of chances to build a CV worth hiring. You can do research, work on meaningful projects outside of class, get internships, etc. no matter what you want to study. All the people I knew who got jobs out of undergrad did some combination of the above regardless of their major. The important part was that they could point to concrete things that demonstrated their skills.
Is it just me or does it seem like $40k has been the default for far too long. I believe (anecdotally) that it's been the average white-collar entry-level salary since the late 90s/early 2000's.
Seems that the number isn't adjusted for inflation and should be closer to $45 or $50k in 2017+
You also need to include other benefits as well. Benefits as a percent of total compensation have increased heavily over the past 20-30 years. Now they make up ~30% of an employees total compensation.
This is why we've probably passed "peak school". For many new graduates, ROI for college is negative. About half of new college graduates end up working in a job that doesn't require a college education.
(It's even worse in some third world countries on the way down. In Egypt, unemployment of college graduates is higher than for non-college graduates.)
The overall aggregate ROI of college should be neutral, right? And therefore half the population will find their individual data points to be negative.
If the ROI of college aggregated over all consumers is positive, then the colleges are mispricing themselves. As capitalists, they should charge more until they capture all the consumer surplus and the aggregate ROI for all consumers converges to zero. This is more or less what has happened over the past generation. (Not all colleges are strictly capitalist, of course, but in broad strokes this is what we've seen.)
Interesting anecdote, but it's obviously skewed. For example: attorneys, nurses, physicians, and accountants are all missing from the graph. From that I intuit that either a) the data intentionally captures people in only their first job or b) the data is just wildly incomplete.
Conservatively assuming this is intended to be a snapshot of first job salaries, it's interesting to note that a $40k salary is in the top 50% of jobs in the US [1]. And again, we expect most of these people to earn increasingly more as they hit their earning stride (which will be after grad school for many).
> Glassdoor sifted through the resumes for the job titles that appeared most frequently in the five years following graduation. Median pay was determined based on salary information self-reported to the site from May 2015 to this month.
I'm not sure if this is a good way to quantify it. It was always common for people to get low end jobs after graduation. It's not the jobs they've done in the last 5 years that are of interest, it's the ones they hold after 5 years.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadat the right company with the right compensation structure, a handful of $100M+ deals can set you up for a LONG time
There are a host of other qualities, but this strikes me the most "inborn" one.
I think it's the same for sales or a lot of other professions. People with talent can go much further.
it is very hard to replicate the behavior of someone that just loves being around people. i can usually tell who is a "natural" and who isn't (i.e. those that went through therapy, coaching and the like)
learning how to be around people can't really be done in a safe space since the world at large in unsafe. people will say dumb shit at you. people will cut you off. people will do unexpectedly nice (or mean) things. everyone is different.
the only way to truly learn these skills is to get out there and be vulnerable. i can see how classes and sessions can get you to a point at which one is comfortable enough to even BEGIN doing this (I went to a few social anxiety meetups with friends), but that alone isn't enough.
getting to the root of that anxiety with a psychologist is more effective, in my (limited) opinion, but that can be expensive for many
you CAN get pretty far on the basics though. most people like being around someone that is humorous and makes them feel good about themselves. you can go REALLY far by finding what someone really likes to talk about and letting them talk (while asking questions throughout)
podcasts with interviews from journalists or news companies helped me with this a lot
People LOVE stories they can see themselves in. Gets their imaginations all worked up.
Also, EVERYBODY has incentives. Money, becoming a 10x developer, travelling the world, being a better parent. All of these are incentives.
If you don't believe me, check this out.
Remember the last time you got pitched a timeshare? (If you ever went on a heavily discounted Disney vacation, you almost certainly did.) The salesperson working the room will spend at least the first 15-30 minutes setting the scene. "You. Puerto Rico. Corona. Beach. Need I say more?" type stuff.
Pyramid marketing salespeople do the exact same thing to build their downlines (i.e. hire more people under them). They spend 80% of their presentation on how much you can make and maybe 10% on what they're selling (the other 10% is lost to heat).
Luxury brands are THE MASTERS at this. (I would not be surprised if hip hop icons got some kind of commission/free clothing from high-falutin haute fashion brands; luxury setting is all they do!)
They seem cheesy, but people eat stories up (and, consequently, buy product) like no tomorrow.
It might take a while to catch up to someone who has been practicing a skill like that all their life, but that's true of anything.
:)
I know some salespeople today, who during highschool were the most introverted, least talkative guys or girls in the world.
Their success is due to practice both in work (entry level sales jobs require non-stop talking for 8+ hours per day, as opposed to entry-level engineering where there are 4+ hours of quiet time), and outside of work (e.g. debate teams, tea clubs, book clubs, meetups, networking events, speech therapists, etc.)
It really comes down to making people (a) think that your shit (mostly YOU) will help them with their problems and (b) feel confident in trusting you.
As for comp: Most people in sales jobs go through ups and downs in their annual comp largely because most of it comes from commission and bonus. You could make >$1M one year and <$100k the next. Technical sales are more stable since salaries tend to be higher, but comp is still highly variable. Also, unlike engineering where one's performance criteria are somewhat superfluous, sales is a very numbers-driven job. Most have quotas they need to hit with bonuses for every level above that. Not hitting your quota == not having a job next month/year in some places.
That would include talent agents, advertising, etc. (You could argue these are all just salesmen)
I wrote a little about this framing it as a CS degree problem, but it seems true for a lot more than just CS.
> Can we prove aptitude is flat? Kinda. In 1970s 1-in-2 college grads aced Wordsum test. Today 1-in-6 do.[2] Using that as a proxy for IQ of the median college grad, in the 70’s it was ~112, now its ~100.
> In other words we have more people going to college than ever, but the “average grad” is less intelligent than ever. Degrees are increasingly diluted yet expensive. You can pay more money than ever to show that you are of average intelligence.
From: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/why-is-computer-science-enr...
Everybody poops.
The same goes for carpenters, masonry, etc. The physical work will wear you down — but by the time that becomes a problem you should be skilled enough to be a manager.
I'm making decent money now, but it's crazy how much trade work was frowned upon when I graduated high school. In retrospect I think I'd be totally happy with being a contractor managing a small business.
I've also hired tradespeople who did put in the time and were worse than doing the job myself after watching youtube videos for a few hours, so at that point what's it even accomplishing.
It doesn't necessarily mean that it takes any more or less effort or intelligence to finish a university degree.
It also doesn't mean that average intelligence is dropping.
It just indicates a stereotypical reversion to mean.
Anecdotally, I'm still baffled at those in my extended social circle who followed a path similar to:
We're extremely luck to work in an industry where meaningful experience only requires a time investment, all our tools are free (or near free) and we can collaborate with other people around the world.
I'm not necessarily talking coursework, either -- how students are treated is very different.
With that said, I'm not exactly sure what type of career path somebody studying, say, political science could embark on -- it seems to me that there's a lot more demand for accreditation in certain fields than there is demand for actual practitioners.
Computers are getting better at sales. Amazon doesn't have salespeople. Retailers barely have salespeople any more. Outside of real estate, cars, and financial products, what B2C companies do?
AWS sure as hell does
Declining for sure, but high ticket B2C still has salespeople.
Home improvement, cosmetic surgery, cosmetic dentistry, vocational education, timeshares, boats, recreational vehicles, insurance, furniture, solar energy, hot tubs, pool tables, pianos, etc.
And a lot of stuff at the low end, home based seller angle...beauty, vacuum cleaners, organic, supplements , diets, and so forth.
[0](https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/)
Selling to businesses, for example, pretty much requires salespeople. For example, I know someone in corporate real estate, and you wouldn't believe the type of shit the salespeople get away with there or how ridiculous their compensation is (especially compared to her, who does just as much work trying to win business when putting together the proposals those salespeople present).
I'm not so sure it matters. Even in engineering, college courses alone won't provide you with a worthwhile resume. In college, you have plenty of chances to build a CV worth hiring. You can do research, work on meaningful projects outside of class, get internships, etc. no matter what you want to study. All the people I knew who got jobs out of undergrad did some combination of the above regardless of their major. The important part was that they could point to concrete things that demonstrated their skills.
Seems that the number isn't adjusted for inflation and should be closer to $45 or $50k in 2017+
http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
Lots more to read here:
https://www.google.com/#q=wages+flat+since+1980
Total compensation per hour has increased 44% since the 80s.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB
for the 1%.
(It's even worse in some third world countries on the way down. In Egypt, unemployment of college graduates is higher than for non-college graduates.)
If pay is also higher then college could still be +EV.
If the ROI of college aggregated over all consumers is positive, then the colleges are mispricing themselves. As capitalists, they should charge more until they capture all the consumer surplus and the aggregate ROI for all consumers converges to zero. This is more or less what has happened over the past generation. (Not all colleges are strictly capitalist, of course, but in broad strokes this is what we've seen.)
Conservatively assuming this is intended to be a snapshot of first job salaries, it's interesting to note that a $40k salary is in the top 50% of jobs in the US [1]. And again, we expect most of these people to earn increasingly more as they hit their earning stride (which will be after grad school for many).
1- https://www.fool.com/retirement/2016/10/30/heres-the-average...
I'm not sure if this is a good way to quantify it. It was always common for people to get low end jobs after graduation. It's not the jobs they've done in the last 5 years that are of interest, it's the ones they hold after 5 years.