employmentHow does a prospective college graduate in the Boston area find a sales or business development job in a start up?
Your job is going to be to go out of your way to enter through the front door. And then come back in by sneaking through the window if you get thrown out. Basically, to get back to a prospect until you finally close the deal.
Before you do any of that, your job in an early stage startup may also involve you going out of your way to actually find leads to contact, and qualifying those leads (aka do they have the money and the use for what you have to offer?).
If you’re unable to do either of those activities, good luck with landing a sales or bizdev job… Honestly.
Assuming you are able to do both, the way to convince an early stage startup to hire you is to show the startup that you can sell yourself.
A few tips:
Network wide and hard. Google one startup, find others that work with it, LinkedIn connections of their founders and key employees, etc. Contact each startup that is looking for a sales. (And heck, even those that don’t. You’re a sales, so show them you can sell well enough to actually land a job that they weren’t planning to hire someone for.) Rinse, repeat.
Give them a good sense of the value you have to deliver when you interact with them. Anchor your salary against the upside you’ll deliver. There’s not much more to it.
If they refuse upfront, don’t let that discourage you, and come back through the window (or climbing down the chimney) with new ideas on how you’d get potential leads or close customers. I’m not advocating that you call them every day, of course, but the general attitude you need to develop as a sales or bizdev is to get back to your prospects often – not to the point where they’ll consider ripping their phone line off of the wall, but just a notch below that.
Displaying a healthy dose of confidence helps tremendously. You’ve many things to learn, and you’ll become convinced you’ve even more of it to learn as you age, so keep humble. But keep confident as well, because confidence goes a very long way in convincing any prospect.
As a startup goes into later stages, the above tips matter less. In larger companies, the focus will shift to you being a rookie that needs to be trained – just like in any other corporation.
And that is actually cool, really: For all you know, you may end up getting mentored by a 50+ year old sales who closes deals you can only dream of trying to close as a rookie.
(I cannot overstate how valuable the latter point is, by the way. When I was in my early 20s, I once was in charge of negotiating and ultimately finalizing a €2M/year deal with a telco. I had proudly gotten 25% off of the initial “tourist” price they gave us. In the final meeting, my 60-year old boss showed up. 15 minutes into the presentation, he interrupted it and asked to get down to business. Within 5 minutes, the 26 year old sales was tomato red. Within 15 minutes their price was cut in half. I just sat there and learned, both shocked and speechless. You will too. So try to get a 50+ year old mentor. You won’t regret it.)
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