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in this video you're going to get an inside scoop on what the day-to-day life is like working in tech sales and you want to make sure you watch this video all the way through because if you're someone who is thinking about working in tech sales or software sales and you're not really sure what the day-to-day life looks like and what the job entails well i'm gonna be sharing my personal experiences working in tech sales in silicon valley at oracle and later at a startup so you get a holistic picture on what the job actually is what's going on everybody patrick here before we get started make sure to give this video a like subscribe because it's free and turn on notifications and if you're ready to start and accelerate your sales career check out my sales master class sales legacy link is in the description or go to saleslegacy.com and let's go ahead and get started so to start things off let's go ahead and take a look at what it's like to work in the early mornings in sales so when you're doing tech sales especially if you are just starting out chances are you're going to be doing a lot of sales prospecting meaning it's a lot of cold emailing cold calling adding and connecting with people on linkedin and your only goal is really just to you know generate a meeting with a potential customer so i remember back when i was at oracle and we were doing a lot of cold calling at the time i had to wake up early you know drive to work and because i lived in san francisco but then the office of oracle headquarters was actually in redwood city which is you know in silicon valley so it's a little bit further down south maybe like a 40-minute drive with traffic and then uh pick up a coffee on the way to work and then try to get to the office around eight a.m and when i usually actually got a little bit earlier than 8 a.m so that i can you know get settled in get my script ready and get ready and then from there it's kind of like you're just you know dialing numbers you know from eight to as many hours as you can go um until lunch right and so when it comes to that day-to-day life it's kind of you know in some ways it's fun and exciting in that you're trying to you know sell to a complete stranger but on the other end you know there's this part of you that feels kind of hurt because it's like you deal with a lot of rejection um a lot of people aren't that nice to you and sometimes it feels like you're bothering them in some ways and so there's pros and cons right sometimes people are very receptive when it comes to the phone sometimes you know you just catch someone at the bad time and they just don't have the right attitude but um when it comes to how i feel about that it's just kind of like that's part of the game right some people are going to be positive some people are going to be negative and that's totally okay because when you do your best and you have the best strategy you just have to keep dialing the numbers and run the numbers and then you're going to be able to get the right information you need and book the meetings that you want now there's also different ways of prospecting right so some companies they do a lot of cold calling other companies do a lot of cold emailing like later on in my career when i joined a startup i did a lot of code emailing and we didn't even cold call um at all during that time when i was working at this specific startup because we found that if we can send a bunch of emails like hundreds every day it was much more effective for what we were doing at the time because there weren't really like specific accounts we were going for we're just you know having ideas of oh we should hit this industry we should try this industry we're trying to go as fast as possible and so code emailing is a different game where it's more about your ability to write emails so it's like copywriting and understanding how to sell within you know text of an email and learning all the different tools of how to you know find the prospects on linkedin get their email address put it in the crm and how to schedule the emails when to schedule the emails and you know how to increase your conversion rates right so it's almost like a marketing job in a sense where it's all about the cold email and that's also fun as well obviously you don't really face any rejection because it's like if somebody says no through an email you don't really care you're not on the phone with them and so because of that you know it makes the job a lot more easier in terms of your emotional stability and then you know if they book a meeting you get on the phone you try to sell them right so um the day-to-day life in tech sales it's going to vary from company to company so you definitely want to ask the recruiter or the hiring manager like okay how do you generate leads is it called emailing cold calling or whatever it is right because you want to make sure whatever method they use that you are comfortable doing that or comfortable learning it um if you don't have that much sales experience because it definitely does play a huge role in terms of what the day-to-day life is like now that we kind of cover like the core responsibility when you're working in sales especially if you're doing sales prospecting let's go ahead and talk about sales meetings right and i'm talking about internal sales meetings so obviously you're gonna have meetings with potential customers you're gonna try to sell them but you may not understand that you're gonna have a lot of internal meetings within your company because you know every company there's going to be some type of company politics you have to you know make sure you build your relationship with people internally so that they can help you out so for a sales meeting you know from my experience working in sales in san francisco in silicon valley it's kind of like you know once a week or sometimes it's more depending on the situation we got all get in the room the whole sales team gets there and then you know whoever's the sales manager will kind of lead the meeting and they will say okay guys so you know what did everyone do this weekend right you know it's literally like that it's kind of corporate in the sense but people just go around the table and be like oh yeah i went fishing oh yeah i rode my bike whatever okay then they get into the actual sales and they look at the numbers they look okay guys so you know based on these numbers it looks like we're sending a lot of emails but we're not getting a lot of responses why is that and as a team we try to figure out okay you know this template is working this template's not working why did that template work and how can we replicate it for the other reps and so it's kind of like a collaborative effort right so when you're joining a sales team at an organization it shouldn't be you figuring out everything from you know the emails and cold calling and you know you shouldn't be doing it by yourself if you are it's unfortunate because that's a you know it's just a sales team that's not very structured and um you know cooperative in a sense but you know usually they will try to teach you they'll try to show you what works and what doesn't and if you're making any type of mistakes they'll be like okay i see your cool emails i see your cold calls we have the recordings i think you can improve on these things and and let's go ahead and practice a little bit and then next time you get you start prospecting again we can work on that together and one very important thing is that it's very important to make friends and allies within your company internally and the reason is because um when you are selling technology and software it's a very technical thing right so if you let's say our sales development rep and then you get advanced into being an account executive which is someone who has to close deals every conversation you know it's going to be a little different some are going to be more high level where it's not super technical and you can kind of talk high level on what you do and how you bring value but then as you get closer to closing a deal usually the customer is like okay i want to bring my engineer on so we can talk about technically how are we going to you know make this work with what we already have and so the reason why you want to have allies is because you need to work with different people like sales engineers is a very important one in tech sales because these are people who are kind of like sales people um but they're not really paid a commission maybe they're paid on bonus oh it depends on the company they're not like the quarterback of the deal they're only brought in when the conversation gets extremely technical or sometimes you might even just get an engineer and have them on the call even though they're not you know that sales focus and so these type of people are kind of selling your product and service for you um from a technical perspective and they're trying to say like hey you know our technology is good it's going to work with your technology there's nothing to worry about and as a account executive right which is what i was you have to build these relationships so that whenever you have a deal coming up or a meeting coming up you can kind of pull those resources and bring them in and they will be happy to help you so it's very important whether you work at a small company or a large company that you build allies the people that can really help you out when it comes to those technical software and technology deals and next let's talk about the pace and environment right so in tech sales in my opinion um it's quite fast relative to other industries like i worked in fashion industry before i worked at a production company and a marketing company and i gotta say technology is a lot faster moving right because well it depends when you work at a startup it's a lot faster because they're trying to figure out part of market fit they're trying to get through as many people as possible have as many meetings as possible get those data points to see what works and what doesn't and they can improve and iterate now if you're working at let's say an oracle or salesforce or microsoft it's a little bit slower especially if you're doing enterprise which is what i was doing when i was working at oracle where you know it's not about high velocity it's more of a high touch and that you just want to build a proper relationship with certain accounts because you only need to close a few deals a year to you know to do well when you're doing enterprise right so depends on the company you're working for depends on who you are selling it to but generally startups are way faster compared to everything else and then more enterprise is is slower relative to startups but then it doesn't mean it's more easier it's it's a lot more work but in a different way there's a lot more approvals and paperwork and things like that versus startup where it's just like go go go go so um if you're deciding like which company you want to work at you want to ask you know the person who is interviewing you like you know what is it like to work here what's the pace is it slower is it faster are you guys still looking for product market fit or you have the fit and you know you try to get a feel of how it works so it depends but generally technology is a lot more faster than let's say other industries that i've personally been in myself and the next thing we're going to talk about in tech sales is company politics now you know company politics is going to exist in any industry uh no matter if it's startup enterprise company they're always you know company culture right and so when it comes to the politics it's kind of like if you're a sales rep working at a large company and you want to keep advancing up the ladder and you know get a higher position well you have to play the politics game in that people have to know who you are right your manager needs to like you um other managers need to like you um the managers you know the director needs to like you and hopefully if you have a relationship with the vice president they need to like you as well because you know when certain spots open up within a company they're gonna look at okay who do we have currently working for us that deserves this spot if you play the politics game correctly well they're always going to think of you when it's time to you know give someone a promotion or give them a better territory or give them a pay raise and so can escape it you know technology just like every other industry there may be company politics it may be better than other industries but there's still going to be those politics that exist so what i did when i was at oracle is i made sure that you know everyone above me like my manager and director and things like that they knew who i was they knew i was hard working and they knew that i was getting results on top of that whenever there are any opportunities to mentor or teach any other of the new sales hires i would always volunteer right and i would spend hours and hours and hours teaching other people what i knew so that they can get up to speed and that's actually how i started doing sales training by just training my peers and people who just joined the company at oracle and i did it completely for free and the reason was because number one i love to help people and i love to inspire and number two there's a politics game where you know the more you help other people you know it's kind of like karma it comes back around and you know you get the rewards definitely so if you're someone that doesn't really like the company politics game that's unfortunate because you're gonna have to play it anyways right unless you're just a super superstar and they just leave you alone but chances are if you're working at like a big name like a oracle or microsoft you definitely have to build those relationships internally to continue to advance in your career and so that said that is pretty much what it's kind of like to work in technology sales and sas sales if you enjoy this video make sure to give it a like subscribe because it's absolutely free to subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications and if you want to take your sales game to the next level maybe star and accelerate your sales career check out my master class sales legacy link is in the description and if you want to join the master class we actually have a free one hour training for you to get an idea of you know what it is and get a taste of it to see if it's right for you so if you're looking to do that check out the link in the description for sales legacy and with that said my name is patrick dang and i'll see you guys in the next one