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      05-10-2016, 09:19 AM   #19332
jtodd_fl
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Verbiage View Post
I've always been people-centric, and I realize that yours and jtodd_fl's roles are customer interfacing and can prove to be lucrative due to the effects that they exude over the scope and acquiring of business.


I suppose the bulk of my customer "interactions" have not been on a level that I desired; i.e., lower-level customer service and retail. But with regard to a higher level of dealings, I would certainly jump at the opportunities.
Great that you would jump at it. A wide range of experience is great. What I think makes someone with Sales experience unique is really the fact that it teaches a few key things:
- Working under pressure - in adverse or ambiguous circumstances
- Learning how to find value
- Communication - speaking the language of value
- Urgency

I now that other disciplines benefit from these traits, but the reality is that there is a component of "sales" in every leadership position. When you lead, you learn to find out what matters to people (employees, investors, customers, suppliers, anyone...), you communicate to them in their language of value (aligning them, motivating them, pushing them). These traits are universal and sales gives people a unique blend of all of these things at the same time. No one is taught the value of urgency or how to be comfortable with ambiguity. Engineers hate ambiguity by nature, their internal language of value is "rightness" or "efficiency" or some other scientifically correct thing. Financiers are black and white people, there are laws and regulations and standards that explain how to do most of it. The people that excel in ANY field are the ones that take the necessaries and add a whopping dose of the intangibles. Someone who is technically proficient, but also adept at communicating and works with a sense of urgency and can quickly take a problem apart and build a solution to it (whether it is a technical problem, a financial one, a marketing one, a cultural one, an organizational one... w/e) is priceless
Damn... that was going to be short...
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