My Month Learning About Sales

After spending a month doing content marketing projects, I figured it would be very logical to go into sales. This post is about my experiences in sales, where I went right and wrong, and my overall thoughts on the whole thing. Enjoy!

Week 1: Introduction to Sales

This first week of sales was not very intense at all. It was very much a mindset oriented week, with all of the work focusing on my personal experiences in sales on the customer’s end of things. Praxis’ approach to this appeared to have been, “if you can understand why a sales interaction went particularly well or poorly, you can understand the ins and outs of sales as a whole, and therefore have the proper mindset as a salesperson”. Although I don’t really have concrete work to share from this week (it’s all just past writing about past experiences in sales), I will share this quote from my dad’s friend, who has been in sales for many years: “Sales isn’t about trying to push a product on an unsuspecting customer, it’s about passing your belief in a product onto other people, where both parties benefit in the end”. I couldn’t agree more, and I’m thankful that Praxis has helped me fully realize that.

Week 2: Problems As Markets for Solutions

Admittedly, this week was a bit of a misstep for me. There was nothing wrong with any of the content, I just misunderstood the premise at the beginning. Our main assignment was to create a sales funnel, which is essentially a chart that shows potential prospects for a certain product/service. I thought I understood at the beginning, but I approached it the wrong way, and didn’t really realize until it was too late to fully change. I’ll go ahead and lay out exactly where I went wrong.

Even though I’m not technically part of this ecosystem, I’ve always been very interested in 3D animation and VFX. In few words, the stuff you see in Marvel movies. I thought it could reasonably work to try and create a sales funnel for a large VFX Studio to market themselves to clients. I originally chose the company Industrial Light & Magic. After a while of trying to figure out logistics on setting everything up, I realized that they were too big of a player in the space for me to really be effective with this, so I had to switch a couple times (this was all working from my phone while on a trip with my dad, which made everything more difficult). I eventually ended up going with Milk Visual Effects, a smaller studio. They’ve had a couple of breakthrough movies, mainly with Marvel, and they have the potential to truly breach the top level of heavy hitting VFX houses. The only issue is that the logistics of how VFX houses and directors collaborate doesn’t translate well at all to the outlines of the project, which I didn’t realize until it was far too late. That being said, I did the best I could with what I had, and I plan on redoing the project in the future with a more fitting company. For now, here’s a quick screenshot of my work on that chart:

Week 3: Growth Marketing Strategy

This week’s big project was a 7-point sales rollout plan. Thankfully, it didn’t have to be related to the previous week’s company, so this time I chose Pulseway, who essentially helps managers and IT workers. Our assignment was very simple: create a short rollout plan for a 21 day period including between 7 and 10 points, mixing different mediums of contact. I tackled this one pretty straightforward; since managers are normally relatively busy, I decided to use email as my main point of communication, and sent all emails in the morning, so that managers or administrators would be more likely to see my email at the top of their feed when they check it in the morning. I made sure to make everything personal and generally cut the fluff, getting directly into how exactly this product can help them. You can check that out here. For now, here is my quick outline I made, without any of the written copy:

Week 4: Documentation & Presentation

This week is all about showcasing my work for the month. One of those assignments is this blog post that you’re reading right now, and the other is a video showcasing how I went about creating one of my social media posts, very simple work. If you’re interested, the video will be included right below.

Final Thoughts + Going Forward

This was a good month! In terms of enjoyment, I liked this at the same level as marketing. They’re obviously different, but I think I could be good at either at this point. Even though I had some missteps at times, I think ultimately I understood the core pillars of the area well. That’s the most important thing, because that means I’ll be able to actively learn fairly quickly if I decided to take this route for a job. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.