Career Tips for Transitioning from Sales to Marketing
As sales tactics shift from cold calls and gap-closing to newer prospecting methodologies. Salespeople might find themselves in the midst of an evolution in the marketplace. Are you ready for the digital transformation on your career path?
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It’s no secret that more and more purchases happened in the digital world. Thus companies began to introduce innovative digital marketing techniques and programs to boost their sales through email campaigns, webinars, social media commercials, and search engine optimizations.
This trend might seem as a treat, replacing the value of salespeople. But it can also be a great opportunity for salespeople to leverage their skill set and make a successful shift in their careers to become a marketing professional. For example, to optimize search ranking, we need to dive into customer’s mind and figure out what are the keywords and key phrases. And here’s the place where salespeople can showcase their strengths of identifying the pain points of customers.
Thus, switching from a sales position to a digital marketing role isn’t too daunting, as many of the skills and characteristics needed are transferable. Both jobs require strong communication, an understanding of the customer, an analytical brain, and problem-solving skills.
Here are the soft skills in sales that will translate well to a marketing position:
- Understanding customer needs
- Translating customer needs into selling points
- Communication and interpersonal skills
- Creating engagement with target customer
- Goal-oriented, resourceful, and persistent
- Collaboration with cross-functional and cross-regional teams
Besides, since digital marketing is relatively new territory, there are some hard skills you should at least understand the logics and platforms, like building landing pages, running a retargeting campaign, bidding the keywords in search, data visualization, and starting an automated workflow.
For those who want to move from a sales job to a marketing career, here are some tips for you to start this journey.
Take Online Classes and Get Certified
The first step is learning and gaining some new skills. This will not only become a plus while interviewing but also show your passion and learning potential. There are some common tools that almost every marketer uses on a daily basis, e.g. Google Analytics, Keyword Planner, Google Trend, Facebook insights, Moz, Adhref, etc.
So, take time to explore those technologies and stay in tune with HubSpot and Google, where often provide free training and certification courses. Also, since digital marketing is constantly changing, it can be helpful to keep yourself to the most up-to-date industry information and market trends. There are some website and podcast that can help you:
There are also plenty of online classes, tutorials, and webinars to get you up to speed on marketing basics, which is a good start. To really stand out, you should first understand the fundamental strategies of the digital marketing world, and figure out which direction you want to take in your future career path. Then make a list of the required skills and knowledge you need to learn. Most of the key programs or technologies have training courses or certificates. Take some time to make yourself a master of one or two tools.
Recommended Courses and Certifications
55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority. — 2018 HubSpot report
Start Your Own Blog
No matter which path you choose in digital marketing, excellent written and verbal communication skills are always required. If you are a salesperson like me, who is more confident about speaking than writing. You should start to write now. Find a topic, apply an account, and publish something every day.
For beginners or those who have too much fear of writing. There are tons of online resources and books talking about how to improving writing skills. I recommend Everybody Writes and The Copywriter’s Handbook: A Step-By-Step Guide To Writing Copy That Sells. They are easy to read and will give you fundamental tips about how to write better. My first blog post was the summary of my reading note from one of the books above.
Having a blog can also show your potential employer that you can write well, you’ll have one foot in the door. In addition, you can write about your research on market trends or specific techniques. The accumulation of your content will make you eventually seem like a subject-matter expert in the area you dug in.
Prove Your Analytical Skills
Jobs in digital marketing usually require analytical thinking and some simple data analyzing abilities. Companies are probably not expecting you have excellent analyzing skills like a business analyst. But the hiring manager will want to know how comfortable you are while handling a complex pile of data.
As a salesperson, you must have a lot of experience in using Excel to provide regional sales reports or review monthly gap. There are several key Excel skills you can highlight:
- Vlookup
- Pivot Table
- Sumifs
- Countifs
- Concatenate
- Conditional Formatting
- Charting
- If statements
Other than excel, you can also research and practice on some data analysis tools. This can be a great opportunity to exercise your brain muscle and prove that you can thrive around complexity and ambiguity. Here are some recommended tools to check out:
- Tableau
- SQL
- Google Analytics
- Google Data Studio
- Adobe Analytics
- Mode (Tools for SQL, R, Python)
Research skills & Problem-solving Abilities
Marketers conduct research all the time to make sense of the target customers’ motivation and interests. So spend time to study value propositions and buyer’s journey within your dream company, or a chosen industry. Your experience in sales should aid your ability to dive deeper into buyer, market, and industry research.
Read industry reports, company white papers, market trends, new technologies, and potential opportunities. For example, if you decide to focus on the IT industry, you may have to learn about the trend of digital transformation, the newest technology, or the biggest players in the IT industry?
Furthermore, don’t waste your networking talent. Reach out to the marketers within the companies you are interested in. Ask about their professional stories, tips to building a career in marketing, and advice on applying. Their career path and opinions will give you a better understanding of the industry and more ideas on how to adjust your strategy in the job search.
Other Extra Points You Can Get
Everyone is in sales, no matter if you are in a sales position. When you are at a career transitioning point, you are selling yourself. Except for preparing new skills for a digital marketing position, you should also highlight how your sales experience related to specific tactics in digital marketing. Try to find some examples in your career and use them to resonate your passion for pursuing a marketing career.
Sales Funnel / Demand Generation
The sales funnel we use to prospect, approach and motivate potential customers is very similar to marketing funnel in demand generating process. So find your most impressive story about how you used sales funnel as a tool to close a deal with a difficult client.
Salesforce Pipeline / Marketing Automation
Did you use Salesforce in your previous position? If yes, remember to point it out. The pipeline management feature in Salesforce didn’t only help you to monitor the progress of your leads, it also provides a strong tool for streamlining the efforts between sales, marketing, and other function teams. Usually, marketing automation program should connect to the CRM system. Then the companies can link the true outcome of each marketing campaign and know how to track and optimize.
Account management / Account-based Marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a fairly new concept in digital marketing. It’s a highly customized strategy where a marketing team treats one singular account (usually big-enough corporate) like its very own market. So all the marketing content, events, campaigns are dedicated to the people associated with that specific account, rather than the all targeted segment. Building such a customized program requires extremely streamlined collaboration between sales and marketing teams, so your sales experience and instincts can really play its value under these circumstances.
