Four C’s of Your Perfect Job
Consider the challenge, career, culture & compensation for job success
The beginning of the year always brings about huge changes. It’s as if we all conspire to store up all the surprise and change till the calendar turns over so we can have a fresh start. In that spirit, m LinkedIn feed has blown up over the past three weeks with new promotions and new jobs.
When I launched the Enterprise Sales Forum over six years ago, sales roles did not seem so critical. Fast forward to 2021, despite the pandemic and the economic devastation of 2020, everyone is clambering for sales talent. As hard as it may seem, it is even harder to find good salespeople than it is to find competent programmers. As a friend of mine put it recently, when the job market begins to heat up, sales reps and managers, “are always on the hunt."
This is also around this time that I am often asked for career advice. The requests come from all rungs of experience, from folks just getting started to hardened industry veterans. Some are just starting the career search while others are confronted with the good fortune of multiple job offers. The same question lingers on their minds though. As they consider their career journey, they struggle to answers, "what is best for my professional advancement?"
There is no simple, one-sized-fits-all answer. Rolled into that question are thoughts of future stability, financial expectations, professional advancement, risk tolerance, and finding rewarding work in an environment that values and recognizes the hard work of sales. Maybe not all that surprising, most employers are still unable to grasp the simple premise of offering rewarding work and recognizing strong results, which often leads employees jumping to new opportunities.
Rather than offer simple answers, I believe people can and should figure out this question for themselves. In that vein, I ask advice seekers four key questions they should consider with any career decision:
Do you feel your work is challenging and engaging?
Does your role help you to advance your career goals?
Does the culture mesh with your personal values?
Does the compensation meet your financial needs?
The simple act of clearing your mind and thinking through your answers to these question will almost always guide you to the most sound decision. You might feel that other things like perks, commute, company stability & reputation, personal dynamics with management and colleagues, etc., are important. You do need to look holistically at each opportunity, but often these are considerations that would be immediate no-go’s early on in the hiring process or you would have no visibility into.
On the whole, the four questions I posed provide a long-term view of what truly matters to you and your career goals. Let’s dive into each question in detail then:
Challenge
Rarely do I meet anyone that just wants an easy job. Nor do we merely want to work for the sake of work. I did my share of work at a few enterprise tech companies, but the endless paper pushing and politicking around deals was a huge distraction and added no value to customers. Ultimately we want to feel that we are doing interesting work that keeps us engaged, builds our skills, expands our horizons, and poses a challenge.
Challenges are important because overcoming challenges enable us to grow in self-esteem and self-worth. You also build up your body of work that gives you professional credibility. Even if the company you decide to work for fails, the work you do there still matters. A good example are the startups that get acquihired. Many of those employees eventually take leading positions in the acquiring company or end up launching new companies.
In the sales capacity, will the new role expose you to new industries, innovative technologies, more senior buyers and executives? Is the nature of the sale different, such as starting a new market, helping an early stage startup build out its sales process, or involved greater internal team collaboration? Look for the opportunities to step into situations that force you to learn, adapt, and maintain curiosity.
Career
We often want to advance in our careers. That is not always the case, but generally we look to build a career path where we add responsibility, prestige, and compensation. And let's be honest, we all have an ego and like the way a big sounding title looks next to our name.
More important than titles though, you want to forge a path that allows you to achieve your professional goals. Sometimes the path is readily apparent, sometimes it twists and turns. You may take a lateral move or start from the beginning if launching into a whole new career. Your propensity for taking on challenges often helps guide you along your career path. When I jumped into tech from trading, I took a massive pay cut, but it was worth it because it led to where I am today as an entrepreneur, book author, and community leader.
Think about what you to achieve professionally in the next ten years. A decade is a good amount of time to plot your career path and allows you to work backwards from your big goal to see what preliminary steps you should take to meet your objectives.
Culture
We often get blinded by the attraction of a particular role, the pay package, the cool perks, or the prestige factor without fully considering the culture fit. Culture runs much deeper than simply liking the people you work with. Though that certainly helps, people will come and go. Culture is what remains and embodies the ethos around work, respect for others, the level of transparency, a body of shared values, and cross-cultural issues.
No opportunity can overcome the misalignment of values. Embedded in culture is the DNA of how a company function, its reputation in the market, and what employees care about. I did some contract sales work for a foreign tech firm many years ago, and within the first few weeks, it was immediately apparent there was a unresolvable culture clash, from accountability to communication. Never discount the importance of shared values with the people you choose to work with, because when work relationships sour with a boss or colleague, a good culture will provide safety and space to resolve differences.
Compensation
If you find an opportunity where the first three C's are a strong fit, then usually compensation is not as critical. Obviously, you want to get compensated fairly, but I have found that compensation usually works itself out if you are doing high quality work at companies that value the effort. The benefit of being in sales is you truly do have the power to overachieve and have that directly reflect your pay.
If the compensation is not where you expect it, you should always ask. Many people never ask for raises or establish a plan with their managers to reach those compensation expectations. This is especially important for women and underrepresented groups who have been and continue to be chronically underpaid compared with their white, male peers. Never allow yourself to be discouraged from asking and probing. If a company is being evasive, that might be a red flag into a bigger culture issue.
It is important to note that compensation is a deeply personal issue. Compensation is tightly coupled to our lifestyle and wealth objectives. There are also very real financial considerations based on your current situation like housing and family. If you take a startup job, recognize that you sacrifice near-term gains for an often nebulous future payout in the long-term. If you take the sales job with a small base but lots of upside, realize that lean periods and bad luck hit even the best salespeople.
If there is one foundation consideration that underlies all of this, it is a fifth C, and that is courage. Might be a strange to mention a job change as courageous, but it takes courage to make a huge change. Starting over is never easy, because of the comfort of what we already know. Even in jobs where the culture is awful, your boss is a jerk, and the pay and upside are limited, inertia and fear of change keep people in terrible jobs. Comfort of the known is the enemy of the courage to face the unknown.
Even with these considerations, sometimes it comes down to one basic question. Do you really feel passionate about the opportunity? That is what most job choices come down, and that is perfectly fine. If you give full and proper consideration to the four questions of challenge, career, culture, and compensation above, at least you will have an informed basis for making your decision and guiding you to better options.
Remember to take courage in your job search and do not settle for a role that does not fit your needs! Your professional development is more than just bullet points on a resume, it is your life journey.
Mark Birch, Founder of the Enterprise Sales Forum
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