I never planned to be a salesperson.
My first job was a marketing internship at Samsung in Sri Lanka. Media handling, product launches, a lot of carrying boxes of brochures. Then brand work at Ceylon Hotels Corporation, then account executive at Ogilvy, where I delivered more than forty campaigns for eight clients. I was a marketer. I had the diploma to prove it.
Then I moved to Sydney, and sales found me.
I’d love to say it was a bold career move. Mostly it was a good job, in a new country, at a company that needed someone who could talk to customers. Before long I was looking after a portfolio of business accounts and, for the first time, there was a number next to my name.
What marketing gave me
Marketing teaches you to think about the many. Who is this for? What do they already believe? What’s the one thing they should remember?
That turned out to be gold in sales, because most sales conversations fail at exactly that point. Someone sends a long email with eleven features in it and the customer remembers none of them.
At Ogilvy I learned that a campaign lives or dies on one line. In sales I learned that a meeting does too.
What I had to unlearn
The polish.
In marketing, everything gets reviewed, rewritten and signed off. In sales, the customer wants an answer today, and a slightly scruffy answer today beats a perfect one next week. I had to get comfortable picking up the phone without a script and saying “let me find out” out loud.
I also had to unlearn the idea that the job was to persuade. The best sellers I worked with in Sydney hardly persuaded anyone. They asked better questions, and then they helped.
Why it matters more now
This year’s European Marketing Agenda, published with the Chartered Institute of Marketing, asked more than 1,800 marketing and sales people where they’re focusing. AI and “sales and performance marketing” came out tied at the top, both on 43%.
I love that tie. AI is pulling marketing and sales into the same room, because the tool that writes the campaign can now write the follow-up email too. The people who’ll do well are the ones who can do both: tell the story, and close the loop.
Sam McKenna describes social selling as showing up, sharing what you know and building relationships instead of pitching. That’s marketing and sales in one sentence.
I didn’t choose to straddle both worlds. It just happened. Ten years in, I’d choose it again.
Accidents make decent career plans.
