Hello Savages,
My quest seems simple on the surface I am to break free from the bondage of retail sales. A kingdom strewn with supply shortages, excrutiating commutes to barren showrooms, and a sales director who's greatest contribution is an email linking to a youtube slide show video narrated by text-to-speech about the "Top 5 Hottest New Kitchen Technologies - 2022".
I'm a millenial, non-college grad, with 6 years of solid sales experience. I hit my numbers, $860,000 ($1.5 mil on the books but no inventory to ship) of some good ol' farm to table luxury home appliance sales last year as a full-cycle rep and then some. I handled my own purchasing and logistics as this was the companies first attempt at having an inside sales rep and they for some reason didn't want to allocate admin support or integrate purchasing with our department. These guys were dinosaurs and didn't think an eCommerce/Inside Sales hybrid model would outperform their current BDR/Showroom model.
Now it's 2022, the market isn't getting any better, and I'm sitting on a $2.5mil pipeline of products that at this point I won't see until early Q3. I don't get paid commissions unless we ship, so my OTE means nothing and I find myself surviving off of a recently negotiated salary increase to $62,000. It was $50,000 until just a under two months ago, but along with 6 new non-revenue generating responsiblities and a new double title (Senior Sales Exec and Sales Enablement Manager) I managed to get a clean $12,000 increase which puts me ahead of the last two years of inflation by a razor thin margin.
I've been trying to get into SaaS for a while now, nothing crazy, just under 6 months. I've gotten to final rounds with Cisco Meraki, third round with Toast, and a few less notable mentions. Meraki was a bust because they wanted me to relocate to San Fran and frankly my life doesn't fit in a broom closet which is all I'm sure I'd be able to afford with the $70,000 base they offered me.
I'm most hung-up about my Toast interview, I got through as a referral from an old college friend, and it was looking very promising. I've got 3 years of experience at all levels of the hospitality industry so I figured I'd be a shoo in. But alas I didn't get in because of a difference in my sales style experience vs what they were looking for, I've got proven relationship and consultative sales experience but they wanted a challenger.
I'm familiar with the challenger style, I adopt a lot of it's principles to my current work, but the market I'm serving doesn't really need that kind of approach most of the time. Between the difference in style and the fact that I don't cold call 100+ people a day they decided it wasn't the right fit.
I feel like I'm close, real close, to finally landing that AE, ISR, or at the very least SDR position I've been chasing. But sometimes my mind betrays me and convinces me that one does not simply get into SaaS sales because every other SaaS job requires years of experience selling SaaS or a bachelors degree in a tech field.
TDLR;
How do I transform a successful retail sales career into an opportunity at a SaaS company, does anyone have any experience with this transition?
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