Sales: My Career, Distilled

June 3rd, 2009 · ChrisH | No Comments

Category: Career Reflections

On a hot summer night in June 2007, my wife and I were dancing like frogs (seriously) on a roof-deck topiary, singing Sma Grodorna with some friends from the office. This diverse company is full of Swedes, and they were teaching us how to properly celebrate Mid-Summer’s day.

Pre-Sma Grodorna festivities with Hanna, Sara, and wife Micha

I’ve had the opportunity to work under some great managers at Meltwater. Those managers included Nick, who left to open offices in NYC and Buenos Aires; Sara who left to head up Meltwater Drive in London; and Hanna who now runs Global Client Relations. These guys were the reason I took this job—they were smart, ambitious, and incredibly warm.

When they left for their new roles, I was on my own. After only 11 months I was running the Philadelphia office: managing several teams of salespeople, training new hires, negotiating contracts, handling recruitment, responsible for presenting our profit and loss to our CEO at quarterly reviews…essentially a small business under my watchful care.

How’d I get there?

I’d never done sales before, and can’t say I was looking forward to it. I figured it would be a stepping-stone to something more…glamorous. A lot of my buddies at Cornell went on to grad school, finance, consulting…I flirted with Law School myself, but ditched that after a year as a paralegal. I eventually wound up in a start-up pharmaceutical software firm where I managed clinical studies.

I was thinking about Business School when I interviewed for Meltwater. What got my attention was the group across the table. Yeah, they’d studied and worked in London, Paris, Stockholm…they had advanced degrees from top-tier schools…but most of all I liked their enthusiasm and respect for one another. I could tell they were trying to build something bigger—that’s what sold me.

I still never would have made it had I not caught the Sales bug. I love the immediacy of it—how you always know where you stand, and how unambiguous that is. I’m still exhilarated by the contacts I get to work with—VP’s, CFO’s, executives at Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, universities… Plus I know that every new client represents a brick in the company we’re trying to build. We pay our own salaries, our own rent, our own phone bills…and when we go out to celebrate, we know we’ve made every penny ourselves.

It can be brutally tough. I’ve been disappointed to see something I’ve worked on fall though; and crushed to have someone I’ve managed stumble, or even fail.

But that’s the thing—sales exposes all the hard edges. My own weaknesses are there for everyone to see, which just makes me fight to work them out. On the other side, all those things they always told you were important—communications skills, leadership, personality, drive—I’m actually cultivating those and being rewarded for it.

So what I tell people is that working in sales, and this job in particular, is like having your career distilled—all the challenges, fears, passion, excitement, growth… it’s all there at once.