What’s it like to work and build a sales career at a start-up?
What comes in your mind when you think about working in a start-up? An unorganized system, undecided goals, unstable salary and the list goes on. Imagine this, you have been facing a lot of trouble finding a stagnant job for a month or two now. You are trying, trying very hard to find yourself a stable job. And one day, you get a call saying “We want to hire you”, you get excited and happy until the moment they reveal that they have a start-up. Your happiness crushes down and you don’t know how to react anymore. Why? Why do we get thrown-off when we are offered a job at a start-up? I know why. Mentality and myths are the ones to blame here. I mean, I know we have seen it all. Start-ups raising a bucket load of money, burning them all and then shutting down but we have also seen start-ups that made it big. We both know the examples.
I have worked in the corporate world for good 3 plus years. And trust me when I say this, it’s not all glitters and gold. Just like everyone else, I thought start-ups are risky and are most likely to fail until I experienced working at a start-up myself. Hence, in this blog, I’ll make sure to share with you everything that I have learned while working at Adrixus and how I’m succeeding at building my base/career in this start-up.
You will be the jack of all trades, especially in the early stages
A start-up won’t have many things in the right place. You might not be able to have the feeling of working in a corporate environment, you might not be able to have the ambience of working in a company, you might not be able to have all the benefits you used to get while you were working in a corporate office but the best part is, you will be your own decision-maker in your field, your own boss. Many start-ups, in order to boost their sales, hire only one or a couple of sales professionals having a good amount of experience in the same field or the industry. So, in this case, regardless of the fact that you were the account manager, a sales delivery manager or an inside sales rep, you will have to fulfil all the tasks, all the responsibilities that lie under your sales KRA. Sometimes, you will also be doing more work than your KRA.
A start-up’s future relies on your early-stage sales operations
Being a start-up, they won’t have any sales process at all. It will you who will have to build everything from scratch and for that, you will have to study their industry thoroughly, research on the on-going trends in the industry, sales trends in the industry, make an action plan and strategize as to how can you possibly boost their early-stage sales and if you do, how can you make it recurring. It might also happen that your sales process might change every day, but you need to be careful while choosing the right one and moving ahead with it. Why? Because without sales and a sales process, a start-up dies. So whatever you decide and implement will directly or indirectly affect their future sales processes and at the same time, it will decide on how they will be able to drive their future businesses.
You’ll develop expertise
Once you will start involving yourself in all the activities in sales, you will not only multi-task but at the same time, you will become an expert in whatever you will be doing. It also might happen that you will indulge yourself between hiring, training, and helping new employees excel, iterating on customer feedback, building brand awareness. But all these will help you engage in work on a daily basis and make you skilful in all the aspects.
Stick around, work hard, be loyal and talk numbers through sales
At a start-up, you will have almost zero competition or no competition at all. You will have your own big space to do something and shine. And make sure no one and nothing steals your light away from you.
A start-up takes a long time before deciding on adding people into their core team, so make sure you stick around them in their hard phases and situations, you support them and let them know that you aren’t going anywhere. They are dependent on you, so make sure that you show them the numbers they didn’t expect and work like it’s your own venture.
If you still think I’m bloating or how can a start-up be this awesome? Make sure to visit us on our website www.adrixus.com
