Do you wake up every morning excited about the prospects of going to work? Are you generally smiling during the day as you go about your activities? Do you love what you do? Do you love the people you do it with? These are all questions that I ask of people or try to uncover as I interview them for sales and marketing leadership roles. The fact is, there is a very high percentage of the population in today’s workforce who views their work as “just another job.” In fact, the level of discontentment amongst most people with respect to their daily work is really quite astounding; particularly given the fact that people spend more time at their work than any other activity.
When we interview people who are looking for sales and marketing positions, we always start by trying to understand what gets them excited. What do they love to do? What are they really good at? How do they plan to carry that passion and positive energy forward in their career? Unfortunately a lot of job seekers fail to make the connection between what they really love, what they’re good at, and what they want to be doing in their job. A lot of times they follow a career path that someone else tells them to pursue, like their parents. You’d be surprised at how many people pursue a particular career in order to subconsciously please mom or dad.
The fact is, that people do best in their jobs when they really love what they do. When they get excited about the work they do every day. When it connects to their inner core and their own sense of purpose. That’s when people perform best at work. That’s when the days go by quickest and that’s when people have a smile on their faces all day long.
If you work in sales because your dad did, or because you thought it might be a good career or because you couldn’t figure out what else it was that you wanted to do, and you really view it more as a job than as a career, you might want to think about this. We see sales people come through our offices that view their job as just that – nothing more than a job. You can tell that’s how their attitudes have shaped their career. As a result, they move from job to job. They jump from company to company and from industry to industry, searching for something they can’t quite find. Their sales achievements are typically poor to average and they’re not capable of really sticking with a company. We see sales people that come through like that and my best advice to them is, “Don’t be a sales person because you’ve been told to, or because somebody thought it might be a good idea for you. Be a sales person because you love it.”
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