Bright Eyed & Bushy Tailed or Slackers?

I just gave a talk to first year business students the other day at my old college on careers in marketing & sales. Some people were very interested in learning what they could about that career path but overall not a lot of interest. Seems everyone wants to be an accountant now - who would have guessed that??

Anyway, I shared the results of a Manpower survey from 2006 that stated that the #1 job in demand ( and the hardest to fill) is that of sales. Interesting. I thought it would be like SOX Compliance Specialist or IT Network Engineer. Certainly sales is dear to my heart having spent 16 years in various sales positions but most companies treat their sales group like an expense just waiting to be cut.

That is a real shame because a properly motivated sales group with the right set of modern tools can acomplish a great deal. Hopefully these young students can see the transferrability of sales activities into other functional areas. Often the experiences with customers, profit margin, delivery problems and credit issues can guide a person in some other assignment later in their career. I feel it has for me.

So most just wanted to know "How much can I make?". That is certainly a motivation but I don't think people who chose a career strictly for the money end up all that happy. I think time will tell if these students were bright eyed and bushy tailed or just a bunch of slackers playing Box 360 until 3 AM......