Lesson 60 - Map Your Career

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Your sales career is a journey that requires planning and intentionality. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to map out your career path and set actionable goals for the future. Your assignment will involve creating a career development plan with milestones for the next 1, 3, and 5 years.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's final episode, you'll strategize your future career, setting yourself up for long term success driven by your career values. Now you might just think of sales as a job right now, or maybe you already know that you want sales to be your long term career, or maybe you're using sales as a stepping stone to something else. There's no right or wrong answer to how you're leveraging your sales job today, but ultimately, you want to make sure that you're thinking about and strategizing for the future, making meaningful decisions that are going to get you where you want to go. The first step to doing that is to understand what are my career values. Maybe you're thinking more about financial wealth or long term success. Maybe you're thinking more about work life balance. Maybe it's important that you work for a team that you want to work for, or a company that's doing good in the world. Maybe you're thinking about connection or the impact that you're driving. Maybe you're thinking about stress tolerance and what you're able to stomach right? No matter what your career values, you want to align your goals to match those. Ultimately, if you're living by your career values, you're going to have a far more successful career, and by the way, it will make you better at your job if you actually enjoy it, so that will ultimately lead to more success as well. Now there's a fantastic tool that you can use for this to understand your strengths, your weaknesses, your values and where you want to go. It's a book called What color is your parachute. I have personally used this book and found it to be incredibly helpful. It's an old book, but it's really withstood the test of time, and you can normally find it at a library, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, whatever. So think about your career values. Really sit back. Ask yourself what's important. Ask yourself about your stress tolerance. Ask yourself about the aspects of your current role that you like and the aspects of your current role that you dislike. What about your past roles? What have you liked and disliked about those you really want to start taking notes on what makes sense for you. Then you want to ask yourself, Where do I want to take my career from here. Do I want to stay in sales long term? Do I see myself in a closing role? Do I see myself moving into maybe a more complex sales role, like strategic sales or key account sales? Do I see myself managing a sales team, becoming a sales leader? Do I see myself becoming a sales coach, sales consultant or sales trainer. Do I see myself working in one of the cross functional roles that I work with? So maybe in a solutions engineering role or customer success or sales development? There are so many ways that you can take sales and really in every aspect of your life, the experience that you gain in a sales role is going to help you. Once you've narrowed down a career direction, you want to research those roles. So find people who are in those roles and set up some time to talk with them. Ask them, What does your day to day look like? What are the things that stress you out or keep you up at night and then be honest with yourself. Are those day to day tasks, something that I want to commit to long term? Is this something that matches my personality or my style? Then if you feel like it is, ask them about the skills or the experience that are required in order to get into that role. So making sure that you're starting to build the skill set that's ultimately going to get you there, even if you want to leave sales for a different career, think about all of the different skills that you can build now while you're in sales that will end up transferring over. And then once you've done some research and you have a vision of where you want to go, you've made a list of the skills and experience that you need to get there, then you want to go ahead and meet with your manager for guidance. Let them know your career goals, ask them for assistance. Ask them for projects that will help you to build the skills that you need to get where you want to go if you want to eventually move into product marketing. Reach out to product marketers. Talk to them about what they do. Ask them if there are projects you can assist with. If you want to become a sales trainer, reach out to your enablement team and ask them the same thing. And then finally, you should make a plan, a one year plan, a five year plan and a 10 year plan. What are the skills that you want to develop in the short term and the long term always be writing down your current achievements and your current actions and how those are going to ladder up into your future goals. I personally have a spreadsheet that I keep where I kind of write these things down. I normally try to set quarterly goals for myself that ultimately are going. To ladder up to those long term goals as well. All right, now it's your turn for today's assignment. I want you to start by taking an online career values assessment. You can find them everywhere if you can't, or if you don't want to do that. You can also rent the book What color is your parachute, or buy it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or other retailers. From there, choose a few career paths that interest you based on those values and your own experience, interview people in those roles to get a feel for what's needed, and then write down the skill gaps that you need to close in order to get there. And then finally, I want you to map out your career goals by breaking them out into one year five year and 10 year plans. Your study guide is going to walk you through this process in more detail, and that is it for today's lesson and for the course. I genuinely hope that you found value in these lessons and in these assignments, and that you've seen these tips work for you in your career. I designed this course to be hyper practical. I hope that you've been doing the exercises. I hope that you've seen those translate into actionable next steps for your opportunities. I hope that it's been able to bring you closer to your manager, your mentor, your new hire buddy, your team, your cross functional partners, your customers, your prospects. And I hope that it's inspired you. I hope that you've learned a little bit about some of the different aspects of sales that can be really interesting and really challenging and really kind of get you out of your comfort zone and get you where you need to go. So it's been a genuine pleasure teaching you in this course. This is one of my favorite things to do, is to teach. So I hope that you've enjoyed it. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out and let me know. I would also encourage you to reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you. I'd love to find time for us to connect and hear your feedback on the course. And then finally, you know you've participated in this course. You've already paid for the course. You definitely don't owe me a thing. But as a favor, if you can leave an honest review of this course, wherever you're taking it, that would greatly help me out. It helps me to spread the word about the course. It helps me to evangelize the work that I've done and potentially reach more sales people that are looking for help as they embark on their new careers. So I hope that our paths cross again. Um, thank you for everything. And yeah, I wish you the best of luck in your sales career. Thank you. Applause.