How to Get a Sales Job With no Sales Experience (5 Practical Steps)

If you are looking for a career in sales, one of the first questions you will be asked during job interviews is, whether you have any sales experience. As a fresher or someone looking to get into the sales domain, you wouldn’t have any sales experience. Then how do you get a sales job?

The 5 steps mentioned in this blog will show you how you can go about getting a sales job. These are the steps that I personally took to get my first job as a Growth Associate.

Let’s jump right into how you get an entry-level sales position without any sales experience.

Highlight Your Sales Skills.

It is almost certain that while applying for an entry-level sales job with no experience, you will be asked why you want to pursue a career in sales.

I have answered this question multiple times during the initial interviews and in the further stages as well. So it’s a good idea to have a scripted answer ready

This could be a particular life experience or any interests you might have highlighted the skills needed for a sales position.

The most common skills looked for in the sales field are :

• Communication skills
• Objection handling
• Research abilities
• Prospecting

There are various such skills you can highlight. The important thing is to have something to back it up with a credible story

I usually explained how I enjoyed participating in research projects during college. I emphasized how it allowed me to use my research skills and communication skills to extract information from the internet and give the final presentation in front of a class. With that example, I went on to explain how I wanted to build on those skills and hence why I chose to pursue a career in sales.

You might not have experience selling a product or a service, but you might have experience selling an idea. Use that.

Understand How Sales Cycles Work

The sales cycle is the process by which a lead is converted into a client. No matter what the product or services are, the basic process remains the same. So understanding this will give you an upper hand in job interviews, no matter what the company domain is.

The steps in the cycle mainly go as follows:

1. Lead generation
2. Outreach
3. Qualify leads
4. Demo
5. Objection handling
6. Closing
7. Customer Success

In this day and age of the internet, you can pick any skill and improve it over time. There are various blogs and even youtube videos by experts and industry leaders that you can refer to, and understand in detail. You can purchase a certificate course from Udemy or Coursera as well. 

Learn How to Use Sales Tools

At each step of the sales cycle, there are certain tools used to make the sales process more efficient. Knowing these tools and learning how they work will help you stand out among the other candidates who don’t have experience and even might put you right up there with the ones who do.

So firstly check the job description for which you are applying. They might mention some particular tools they use, so you start by learning about them. Some of the most commonly used tools by sales professionals are:

• Hubspot (CRM)
• Linkedin Sales Solution (Lead Generation)
• Zoom (Video conferencing tool)
• Reply.io (Email Outreach)

There are several such tools you can learn more about. There are blogs and youtube videos that go into detail about how these tools work. Now you don’t need to completely master these tools. But being aware of them and understanding their basic working could be a huge plus point from a job perspective.

Company Research

One way to impress the interviewer is by showing how much you know about the product or the services that the company provides.

It is highly possible that you will be asked to write a cold email template and even have a mock cold call, to prove your sales acumen. During such assessments, you can use the things you learned about the company to your advantage.

You can start the research by visiting their website. These are the things you should make a note of

• Product/Services
• Stand out features
• Target Audience
• Case Studies
• Testimonials
• Blogs

Linkedin is a good place to carry on the research, especially to understand their social media presence. You can also try and connect with other members of the organization as well.

Overall the idea here is to make it look like you have put in the effort. The fact that you lack experience is not something that can be changed before an interview. So instead you can equip yourself with some of the other skills and knowledge they might be needed for the job.

Build a Resume Highlighting Your Sales Skills.

The point of going through the first four steps is not only to identify your skills and equip yourself with more subject-based knowledge but also to create an eye-catching resume.

• Mention experiences from school or college that highlight your sales skills. It could be a project you worked on, any internship activity, an elocution competition you might have taken part in, or any experience you might have in the product or the services the company you are applying to provides.

• If you took up any certificate course to learn more about the sales cycle or the tools used by sales professionals, you can mention those in your resume. This will highlight that you have a basic understanding of how the sales process work and will show that you have actively taken initiative to learn more about it.

• Then you can mention the tools you identified and learned more about under the technical skills section. You can name them and mention how proficient you are in each. If a specific tool is mentioned in the company’s job description you should certainly highlight it.

• The research about the organization and its services will come in handier during the interview process. But if you find any information that will help to personalize the resume further you can use that as well.

It is important to make the resume as specific as possible. Usually, recruiters are looking for certain keywords in these resumes. The job descriptions will give you a good idea about it what these keywords might be, and mentioning them will help you out in the screening process.

Conclusion

Companies in almost every field and sector need a sales team. Any product or service needs some kind of marketing and sales team to connect with its target audience. The sales job profile can go by many titles such as Sales Development Representative, Account Executive, Business Development Associate, and Inside/Outside Sales Representative. As you grow within your entry-level position you’ll start getting a better idea about how this works and then work towards that certain position.

If you are determined to make it in this field and have the skills in sales, then you should start applying for sales jobs. The more applications you send out, the better your chances will be of getting a job. You need to find as many sales jobs as you can and apply for them and have follow-up conversations with the people that are responsible for hiring. Remember that persistence is key here. It is an important trait in every sales professional. 

We hope that this blog post has helped you find some new ideas for how to get a sales job without any sales experience.

If you have any other ideas on how to get into sales, please leave them in the comments section below. We would love to hear them. Thank you for reading, and good luck in your search!