Noob School - Episode 31: How I Got My Start in Sales with John Sterling

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

John's advice for Noobs is based upon a lot of his own experiences. But here's the thing—he didn't do things the way he now tells the Noobs to go about their job search. Sure, John's journey brought him to the top of his field, but he'd be the first to admit that a fair amount of luck was involved. You don't want to rely on that. Take a listen to this episode to hear the John Sterling Sales Journey from the man himself! Follow John on social media: Instagram: instagram.com/johnsterling_ Facebook: facebook.com/johnsterlingsales Twitter: twitter.com/johnsterling_ TikTok: tiktok.com/@johnsterling_

Hey, welcome back to Noob School. Today's episode, is just me. It's going to be a relatively short one, but a very important topic. This is one of the ones I get asked a lot at the Noob School. I've been asked, like, John, what was your first job search like? And what would you do different today? So I'm going to go through that today. And I hope it might humor you to some degree to hear what a horrible job I

I did. But also it might help you as you find yours, make it easier. So first of all, let me say, anything's possible, right? You can do, you can not follow any of these guidelines and still end up eventually with a good job in the area that you like. It just may be a lot harder than it needs to be, and it may take a lot longer. So the people that are happiest, the quickest in their business life kind of have everything planned out ahead of and they're prepared. I wasn't. Okay.

So all I knew was that I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do. I went to a good college. I had a political science degree, which doesn't do you much unless you want to go into government or law school, which I didn't want to do. I liked business and entrepreneurship and selling, and I'd done some of that in my life, a couple of different places, like in college and even in high school. So I had an inkling that I could do it. But I wasn't sure what I wanted to start that with.

And part of my challenge was I was thinking about doing everything. You know, I wanted to do this. I want to do that. I want to work for a big company and learn the basics of business. I wanted to work for a small company. I wanted to start a company. I wanted to do something locally in Charleston. I wanted to do something in California.

I wanted to go overseas. I mean, literally, you know, I've got a challenge that way. I like to try to do too many things. So imagine what it was like being a college senior and very little, you know, there wasn't any, like, good college guidance at the time. There were books or websites to go to. So I just kind of, you know, try a few different things. So I decided that I was going to go into sales because I could.

I couldn't think of anything else I was qualified to do or could get a job at. And good decision I made was I went, I picked an industry, the computer industry, which was back in the mid-80s, it was like PCs and the Apple and all that were just starting to get popular. So I picked a good wave to get on. And the other good decision I made was I literally went to the epicenter of where all that stuff was happening. is Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, and moved out there.

Didn't have a job. Hardly knew anybody. Had just a handful of names of people that, you know, somebody I knew in Greenville knew. And I started, you know, started looking around and having meetings. And, you know, eventually I found a small company that would hire me to do lower-level computer sales. And then through that company, I met another company that sold software over the phone nationally. And so I kind of upgraded my job from one to another. And then eventually found another company out there that was selling computers over television and other formats.

And went to work there, kind of another little job upgrade. and, you know, that all kind of led me to the computer software industry. And when I eventually moved back to Greenville where I actually wanted to live, you know, I had some training in how to sell software, and I was looking for a small computer or software company I could go to work for and hopefully be partners with because I wanted to continue to be a part of this wave of computers and software. So, and I eventually found it.

You know, I found a little company with five people, and I had some skills. And I'd been to California and kind of seen how they did it out there. And it just kind of worked out for me. But I probably on the checkbox thing, I probably checked like three boxes out of ten. You know, if I was coaching you, I would say check all ten of these boxes. And I checked a few boxes, and I had to work really hard. And I think I was making it $1.10 an hour. plus commissions and, you know, it wasn't like I was in the fast track at IBM, kind of in the,

you know, one-year training program kind of thing to learn what I was doing. It was really some hard scrabble work, but it led me to a great place, but I wouldn't recommend it. You know, I'd recommend you do more planning than that. I'm going to tell you about some of these things that I would do or recommend you do yourselves. So one thing, is, you know, if you're not sure what your passion is, some people say, man, my passion is sports. You know, I want to be in the sports field somehow. I want to be a player or an agent or a manager or I want to sell apparel or anything that keeps me in the sports community. Or someone might say, I want to be in the musical area.

Maybe as a performer, maybe as an agent, maybe someone who sells equipment, maybe someone who teaches, maybe who does something on the web, I don't know. But if you can find an area that you like, that you'd like to be in kind of the next, let's say, the next 30 years of your life, where you go to a trade show once or twice a year and it's about that business, would you feel happy going to that trade show? Like it was for me right now, I love music. If you said, gosh, you go to the saxophone, you know, trade show twice a year, John. It's part of your job. It'd be like, yeah, that's perfect. I might go to that anyway on my own nickel.

So if you can find something you really like to do, then you ought to push to be in that area. If you're not sure that you can intern. And it depends on how much time you have, right, before college is out or before you get your full-time job, but you want to start as early as possible. It's certainly not unreasonable to start in high school and to get low-paid or no-paid jobs working in different fields

to see, do I like working in PR? Do I like working for a big company? Do I like working in the sports field? Do I like the music field as much as I like to play music? Who knows? But internships are a great way to do it. I wouldn't freak out about the money so much. I would just try to touch as many places as possible

and see which one you like the best. Another area I would look into is I would contact, let's say, 10 to 12 people that you, they're a good friend of yours, good friends of yours, particularly people that are maybe a little bit older, maybe some of your friends that are 10 or 15 or 20 years older and you that you consider trustworthy, and say, hey, what do you think I'm good at? What do you think I would be good at when I get my first full-time job? What do you think? And very often, you know, you'll get three or four people out of 10 who say the same thing. They'll all say, oh, my gosh, we've always

thought you had such empathy, you should be a doctor, or you've got the gift of gab, you know, or you're such a funny person, you're such an actor, you should go into entertainment. If they tell you, you know, if the majority of those people tell you the same thing, you probably ought to check that out, make that one of your internships. So that's one thing you can do is just do a quick survey. Email is fine. You can do it in person or over the phone, but email is just fine. See, if you can find a consensus,

or something that you ought to try. Another one is to take the temperature yourself, and it's write your own list of these are the things that I've always been good at, right? Like I say in my case, if I had taken that in college and I said, have I always been good at, like, balancing my checkbook? No, of course not. I wasn't good at it at all. But if I was, I'd say, you know what, I always just naturally, I'd balance my checkbook, I've got my budget written out for next year. You know, maybe you have the discipline and the natural, you know, numbers instinct to go into it and be a CPA. You know, it's just different strokes for different folks.

So the key is to find out, you know, what yours is. And again, I'm talking a lot about finding what you want to do before we talk about, like interviews and all that kind of stuff. So we want to, I think once you find what you want, I don't think getting as hard as you think. It's harder to pin down that exact thing you want. So another thing you can do is if you start to narrow down, let's say, the field you want to work in. Let's say you want to work in entertainment.

And you're willing to work, you're only going to work in the Washington, D.C. area in the entertainment business. Because your family's in Washington, and you're not going to move to Hollywood or New York or wherever else they do these things. What you would need to do is start to research the companies that are hiring that area in entertainment or headquartered there even better. Like I know Discovery Channel is headquartered there. Make a list of the top 10 of those companies that are in your space, then you're in your region, and you start to learn those companies inside now. So that's your job now. You don't have the job you're looking for, but your current job that I've just given you is you become an expert at the job. these top companies in your area and you understand who runs them, who runs the divisions,

who runs sales, try to meet some people that are already in the sales organization, start to learn it, start to try to commingle and meet them, introduce yourself to them on LinkedIn, you know, whatever you've got to do. I don't mean all at once, okay? Just over time, you start to drip a drip campaign, drip, drip, drip, drip on these companies where you start to get to know them. And if you get to know them after about six months or so, you'll start to be able to talk to them about what's really going on with the company. Is it a good time to come there?

Who are they hiring? What kind of people are they hiring? What are they hiring? Start to get the inside track on what's happening of these companies. Because if you're just going, you know, portal, portal to portal seeing who's hiring, you know, that's not how you're going to win here. Yeah, it's interesting. It's similar to how you're going to win as a salesperson. So once you get the job, you know, the great salespeople use the same tactics I'm talking about

to figure out who the prospect is, who runs the prospect's company, what's going on with their company, what are their problems, you know, when are they going to buy stuff, are they buying some other company, or they get bought? They understand all that and figure out how they can weave themselves into it to be helpful, just like you can as a potential salesperson. So you understand them, you start the drip. And, you know, I think you'll find out, first of all, you know, five or six or even seven of these companies you think are top ten, you might not want to go work there, right? Might be some bad juju going on there.

Maybe they're about to get bought. Maybe it's a hectic sales organization with lots of turnover. So you're narrowing the field down to just the ones that you really want to work at. And once you find those, again, you put more emphasis on working with them and you take any job. you can get. Mailroom, you know, front desk, anything to get your foot in the door. And then all of a sudden, once you're on the other side of the glass, then you're going to know, you'll know the VP of sales, you'll know the salespeople, you'll be, you'll like, yeah, I'm just in line. I want to get this job, whatever, you know. So it's up to you to find your way in here. And this is a great way to do it.

So you narrow it down to your industry and your geography and you get in the door somehow. Another thing I highly recommend you do. And you can do this first, if you like, is you take a test. It's called the Colby test. K-O-L-B-E.com. I think it costs $60. So you just go there and give me your credit card and take the test. It takes the test.

It takes about 20, 25 minutes. And they have a history going back, you know, decades and decades of people taking this relatively simple test. And then looking forward and seeing, you know, what these people were good at based on these results. Like these people, they gave these answers and they ended up in these kind of successful or not successful situations. So I've used this test on myself and hundreds and hundreds of others to help figure out, you know, Colby helps. helps you figure out what are you naturally good at? Okay. What is your natural place where you're just naturally good? Like, again, I've told you, I'm not naturally good as an accountant. I'm naturally good at being a salesperson. I'm naturally good at entrepreneurship.

So anything, you know, that requires kind of being on your feet and, you know, talking to people, I'm okay with that. I still got to work at it, but I'm pretty good at it. And if you said, John, you know, let's review this P&L for the last three years. I wouldn't be very good at it. So you take this test. It's going to come back. And bottom line, it's going to say, we think you would be best at this, this, and this. You might be pretty good at this, this, this, and this.

I would avoid this, this, this and this. So it's kind of an easy, kind of a C-Spot-run type deal. It can get as detailed as you want beyond that. But I like it because it's simple. And it says these are your key areas we think it's going to be easiest for you. So I would definitely take the Colby, and that will help you figure out what area, what industry you want. So if they say, you know, gosh, you would be particularly good at being a CPA or let's say, yeah, particularly good at being a CPA? And you said, well, great, who are the CPA firms that are in southern Florida?

Because that's where I'm going to live. And maybe there's three or four of them and you start peppering these people. So, you know, it's not that complicated. It works for a sales job just like it does the CPA job. So I would say, you know, in summary, if you want to get that first sales job and you want to make it, like, unlike me, my first sales job was not great. It kind of got me started in Silicon Valley. You know, it was kind of like the ante to get me in the game. But, you know, if you want to.

make it easier on yourself. You pick your geography like I did. You pick your industry like I did, but you do a little more homework on the companies that would be hiring brand new out of college salespeople and start to figure them out before you just show up and start knocking on doors. It's doable, but I would do a little more planning and make sure to take the Colby. It can save you some heartache in jumping around different, different sales. areas. So good luck to you. If I can help you, go to noobeschool.org and contact me, and I'll be happy to help and do anything I can to make getting your first job as easy as possible. Thank you.

Hey, it's John here. Thanks for listening today. Please check out noobschool.org. That's my website. That's where we have other videos and content that can help you get started in sales.