[E58] Q&A Week: How do I get my company to move me out of sales?

This one has many possible answers, which would depend on who is asking and where they are at in their sales career.

But I do my best to answer the question “I am struggling to be successful in my sales role but my company won’t let me change to another department. How can I get them to let me move instead of quitting?”

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Episode 58 – Transcript

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Sales Experience Podcast. This is episode 58 my name again is Jason Cutter.

So glad that you’re here. Make sure that you subscribe to this wherever you downloaded the podcast. From that we can get each episode every single day of the week. When I launched these, any guest episodes that way you’ve just got it. Its download, it’s ready to go.

This is on Stitcher, Soundcloud, Spotify, iTunes on the cutter consulting group.com website. Castillo’s. It’s a whole bunch of places. If you can’t find it, let me know where you’d like it to be. I can put it up there. Find a way to get it hosted wherever we need to so it’s easiest for you.

Hopefully you’re enjoying this daily dose of some sales information, sales tips, strategies, information and I appreciate you listen to this and being on the path of wanting to be a sales professional that’s changing the landscape of how sales is viewed.

That sales experience is so important both for you and the prospects. Now, a lot of times we talk about, you know, sales experience or another popular term is customer experience, where it’s all about what the customer’s experiencing and how is the customer experiencing the company and what are they feeling from chats to text messages to emails, to phone calls, to the website, and it’s all about the customer.

You know, when I talk about the sales experience, yes, it’s about the sales prospect. It’s about them moving to a customer, to a raving fan, to a referral advocate and that part. But this is also about you. It’s about you, the sales person, and the sales professional.

That’s also my goal because it all starts with you. I want you the sales professional to be happy, to be fulfilled, to be getting your goals, to be living your passion, living your life that you want.

Now, you could be new in sales and you’re like, I’m not very passionate about sales. I’m just doing it as a job. That’s totally fine, but your goal should be in your life to get to where you want to be or where you should be over time.

 Once you figure out where you best fit in and you know what you can do with your talents, your skills, your abilities, your experience, and how you can make a difference in the world and get paid for it. So the sales experience in the sales experience, podcasts is about you first, the salesperson.

Ultimately, I want you to be sleeping well at night. I want you to get up every day and be excited to run into the office or run to appointments or run on the phone and just help people out knowing that that’s what you should be doing at this point in your life.

You’re making an impact. You’re helping people, you’re making a difference, and you’re getting fulfilled. Your excited about what you’re selling, whether it’s a product or service, you believe in it. You believe in yourself. If somebody says no, you understand that that’s not about you.

If they say yes, you know you’ve impacted their life in some way, whether it’s big or small. And you sleep well at night. I mean, that’s the common thing about salespeople. It’s like how do you sleep at night? And when you’re doing the right thing and you’re helping people in the right way and you have something that you believe in, then you sleep great.

Especially after a long day of working, which feels super easy. You leave it all on the field. It’s not an issue at all. You don’t mind working a lot. It’s excited.

You actually feel more energized the more that you’re involved with helping people buy from you. And a, it’s a great feeling. And that’s what I want first because when you’re in that zone, then the customers will feel that and they will have a magical, amazing experience that will feel totally different than anything else from any other sales person they’ve ever dealt with.

So, just wanted to send that reminder to you. Have you hear that from me? That’s my goal with all of this. And that’s where I want you to be. There’s obviously lots of episodes. I mean, this is episode 58, and, with the guest episodes and everything.

This is like 60 something different shows that I have put out there. And so there’s lots of material on how to get there. And obviously my goal is to answer questions to go through different themes. But that’s it. That’s the purpose of this is to help you with, so, your mind set and getting to where you need to be as a salesperson so that you can then be that for other people.

So now for today’s question, it’s Kind of swaying into this is the question that I see a lot and or situation I see a lot is this, I’m struggling to be successful in my sales role, but my company won’t let me change to another department.

How can I get them to let me move instead of quitting? Or do I need to quit? The challenge is kind of two sides. One side, which is the basic, basic, basic is sometimes in life you go into something you’re not sure if it’s going to be a good fit.

I mean, I’ve done many different careers, so, most of which I was good at, but some of which I wouldn’t want to ever do again. And sometimes it’s literally just a square peg in a round hole. That’s what life is about. Life is, is partially about figuring out where you should be and where you can be and where you add the most value.

Life and experiences is also about where you shouldn’t be, what you don’t like, doing, what’s not a good fit. And, same thing with relationships, the kind of person that you shouldn’t be with versus, you know, learning about yourself and what works and what a better fit is for you.

Same thing for work. And so sometimes literally it’s just a bad fit. Sometimes you shouldn’t be in sales. I’ve seen people apply for a sales job, get hired by lunch on the first day of training. They’re already asking for a change and the in a move because they realized, wait a second, I didn’t really, I shouldn’t really be here.

 I shouldn’t do sales. This is really not a good fit for me. So sometimes that happens. You gotta assess yourself, have, you know, self-awareness enough to look at that and understand where you should be.

Now as far as the company goes and moving you, here’s the challenge is, and from this is from the company perspective, if your losing in your role, it can be really tough for the managers to justify keeping you with the company and moving you to another department.

Now, obviously if you’re not a good fit at sales, but you should be something else, like I see a lot of people who enter sales and it turns out they would be really good at customer service. The nurturing, supportive, caring side of them is so strong that they’re so great.

Like when they get that person on the phone who is ready to buy, they close it. It’s a great relationship. That person is so happy that prospect that turns into a customer so excited. However, this salesperson who should be in customer service can’t push other people, don’t ask for the clothes, don’t set strong appointments.

You know, they’re not actually doing the sales part of the sales role. They’re really just becoming an order taker, which if they go into customer service is fantastic because they’re nurturing, they’re caring, they’re supportive, they’re solving problems, you know, they’re taking lots of calls, lots of feedback, and they’re helping people out and that’s amazing.

 So sometimes that’s the case and if that’s the case for you, then it shouldn’t be about your failed sales metrics that are keeping you from moving over. However, what I see a lot of the time is that somebody who’s not doing well at sales, they start having a negative attitude.

They start being toxic, they start complaining, whether it’s on the floor, it’s to their manager directly. It’s to other people. They just have this negative vibe and who’s going to want that? The manager of customer service, the manager of operations, who’s going to want this toxic negative person that maybe they should be in customer service.

Maybe they will be happy all of a sudden. But the challenge is what happens if they become unhappy and customer service? Are they going to turn back to being this toxic kind of cancer person who is then just complaining and having issues? Right? Because generally if somebody is who they are, there’s just going to be that every time they face difficulties.

So keep that in mind if you’re not getting the transfer you want, it could be a, there’s no openings available, but it could be like how you’re representing yourself. I will say that I’ve had many, many, many salespeople who have worked for me or you know, somewhere in the organization and they just are terrible at sales, like literally can’t seem to close a single deal.

 Yet they are working hard. They’re making tons of calls, they are trying, they’re asking for feedback.

They are literally out dialling everybody else on the floor even though they can’t close a single deal because they’re giving it everything they can and they’re literally just in the wrong seat. And when I see someone like that, I am happy to help them move to a better department that fits better for them. And I will give that recommendation to that other manager that you need to take this person.

This person is a machine. When I see somebody out dialling everybody else, even if they’re not closing deals, I know they’re going to work hard in any role and once they find the right place, it’s going to be a home run.

So if that’s not you, if you’re not successful in sales and you’re not putting in the effort and you’re not trying and you’re not opening the open to coaching and you’re kind of negative or toxic, then don’t be surprised so you don’t get moved to.

The best thing is it might be is to leave that organization, do some self-awareness, kind of figure out where you should be and go that different direction. If you’re grinding it out, if you’re doing everything you can and you still aren’t getting moved, maybe they don’t have any openings or maybe they just don’t believe in that. And that’s something you also want to watch out for as well.

Most of the organizations I’ve ever been with are very supportive of moving the right people into the right positions for them and not losing a valuable asset. However, some organizations I’ve seen, it’s your in sales and you’re not moving ever, and they don’t believe in moving anybody.

You’re in customer service, you don’t move. And so if you’re in that kind of environment, you want to be careful because that means the ownership doesn’t necessarily appreciate valuable talent and personalities and people who are hard workers.

Instead, they just see everyone as a commodity that fits in one bucket or the other. So hopefully that helps. Again, not the quote, not the answer that most people want to hear. Most people want to hear like it’s the company’s fault or it’s the manager’s fault, you know? But really take the time to look at it.

Like if you’re not getting a transfer and you’re not putting in the effort to try at what you’re doing now, then maybe that’s you. Maybe it’s time for a bigger change. And if you’re struggling at sales, just keep plugging away. Keep asking for feedback and keep doing everything you can.

That’s really the key. Again, make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you can download it. Send me feedback, send me your questions, send me any ideas or anything that you want me to cover. And if you want to hop on a phone call, go to the cutter consulting group.com website.

You can fill out the form, you can find me on LinkedIn at slash j a s c u t u or search Jason Cutter on their cutter consulting group, the sales experience podcast. You can find all of that on LinkedIn. And until next time.

Always remember that everything in life has sales and people will remember the experience you gave them.