Ever since my early college days, I knew I wanted to be a salesperson. To me, a salesperson was someone who could understand complex problems, map them to effective solutions, and make a lot of money in the process. A sales career provided the perfect mix of challenge, flexibility, and opportunity.
I started out with sales competitions in college to get a sense of what sales conversations could entail and my abilities (check out this post from 2014 from my first ever competition). Then I moved on to internships (at Target, so I could experience consumer sales, and IBM, so I could understand business sales). Next, I went into IBM’s full time sales training program. After that, I joined a startup called Looker, which was then acquired by Google. Throughout all of this time, I also facilitated sales trainings and was part of sales networks.
The opportunity to interact with top executives and create my own strategy for the customers I worked with was empowering and put me in a position to grow my skills every day.
But I started to wonder, “How else could I use my capabilities? Would I be a salesperson forever?” I felt my priorities shifting from climbing the ladder and working on bigger accounts and having more responsibility, to wanting explore a different type of role altogether with a different balance between work and life.
This was scary! I had been single minded in my focus on a sales career for so long, and had enjoyed it so much, that seriously considering doing something else felt unattainable. I waffled. I cried. I wrote long, winding entries in my journal. I asked family. I asked friends. I asked mentors.
And then I realized, I can always change my mind again. I am not locked in to one role just because it’s what I did in the past, and I’m not precluded from a role in the future just because I did something different for a time. I’ve changed my mind about where to live, the art I value, and countless other things. This doesn’t make me inconsistent, it makes me a human with varied interests and experiences. It makes my perspective even more valuable.
Once I got to that realization, I started to identify what I wanted to try next (and I communicated with my manager – check out more tips on how to leave your job the right way here), which led me to my current role of managing the sales content for our Data portfolio. Everyday I’m working on the materials that salespeople use to talk to our customers about our solutions and creating content that will support them. I’m able to use my creativity to serve the Google Cloud sellers at scale and I’m finding it so rewarding to develop my sales skills in a new way.
This shift has not only reinvigorated me to use my creativity in new ways at work, but offers me better balance with my life so I can be more clear headed when I’m with my family. There are tradeoffs, but for my life right now, I couldn’t be happier.
Remember, you can always change your mind.
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