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How to get that job in July 2011
By Charles Martin | July 18, 2011
I’ve got the best job in the world. Period. I’m a marketing consultant for LivingSocial. We are the best option for a small and medium-sized merchant to connect in their hyper-local market for real-time commerce. That’s another post for another day.
I also started another “best job in the world” in October of 2010. I worked at Open Table for a short while. A great job at a great company. In fact, I’ve been loaded into two great opportunities in the past 10 months.
The numbers don’t lie. The nation’s unemployment rate is high at somewhere near 9.5%. I’m going to tell you that those statistics won’t change in our lifetime. You might not agree. I’m sure that the bulk of the unemployment rate contains jobs that just won’t reappear. We can blame politicians, but history tells us that Presidents and our congress have little impact on jobs, especially in an immediate way.
We, as a nation, have been bullied into accepting subpar service led by inept call center reps in foreign lands. It’s not the foreign lands that are the problem. It’s the little they actually do for us. It’s the almost nothing they do for our economy. Companies really don’t care about giving you your credit card balance at 2AM and thanks to our dependence on the Internet, we opened this door many years ago. When I worked in retail they used to say that “Suzie the sales gal is dead”. She sure is. Suzie used to care about digging out ten pairs of white gloves and making sure you had the right pair. She was incentivized. She was part of the equation. Most jobs in America leave out the people that are actually doing them. Thankfully not mine.
The jobs that won’t return are jobs that our business owners have replicated in other countries or have deleted altogether. Manufacturing was taken out of the equation in the 1990′s and 2000′s. Now we are choking on sub-par minimum wage jobs. The people filling those jobs are not rising up like we did after high school. There’s a missing middle transition step from those jobs to a professional career.
It’s almost every day I hear someone say they have a fraction of college. It used to be rare or at least not the norm. Now so many 23 year olds I meet are just a few semesters into college and full of student loan debt and they’ve stopped. This isn’t the fault of Starbucks. It’s not the fault of our politicians. It’s the fault of US. We just give up too early. So so is just good enough now. This is also why there are so many unemployed. So many people think it’s ok to sit home and study Ellen. I’m not big on who collects unemployment checks because I know the stats on those are highly skewed, but there it’s more the norm now than ever.
If You Want A Job
The jobs I signed on for are sales jobs with forward-thinking, progressive companies that can’t replicate what I do in China or don’t cut back on the top of the funnel.
That’s the point.
Live at the top of the funnel.
Any company has a revenue stream and usually it’s driven by sales teams. That team can be three people or three thousand people. But companies will always need revenue builders. If you aren’t up to sales, think again. Thanks to a job I really enjoy and excel in, I have recruited numbers of good marketers to LivingSocial, my new sales home.
Sales and marketing jobs come in many different sizes and shapes. If you connect people needing home loans, you are a sales person. If you are a bartender, you are a salesperson. I could even argue your mail carrier can be a salesman.
There are jobs out there. Understanding the way companies make money and who the players are that bring about revenue, you can make lots of money. Retooling your approach is the hardest part. Many people I know are actually ex-sales people and since I’ve come into the gold mine that is my current job, I’ve received a lot of outreach from old high school buddies. I get them on the phone and after a few minutes I usually realize that they aren’t really up to the real challenge of what work in 2011 is about. If I work 12 hours today, it’s not enough. With 10, I can make my quota and a good living.
The so-called unemployment rate is helping employers do one thing. They are able to perpetuate the mystery of those numbers and make sure everyone is locked into the malaise of “what if” and what lies on the other side of employment.
That’s ok.
I’m a salesman.
Topics: Greats in business, Sales Acumen | No Comments »