What’s the top priority when starting a new sales job?

The start of any new sales adventure brings about significant new challenges; new people, new surroundings, new actions, new routines and much more. When a new employer pays you money, sales representatives are now tasked with providing value to validate an employer’s investment in any individual person.

As performance is tangibly measured in every single way imaginable — such as the number of touch points, connections, meetings, and revenues we generate with and from our targeted customers —sales representatives must start off on the right foot right from the get-go.

Sales work typically comes with time-bound targets — with each moment that passes by without tangible movement towards our target, the pressure intensifies to perform; employers need to make a timely determination on the viability of an individual to generate sales and revenues for the company.

When starting, how do you identify your priorities when there’s so much to understand? Some of the key P’s to understand include:

• product-market fit
• positioning of the company in the market
• pitch and presentation
• profile of the customer
• pipeline development and management
• people within the company and their respective roles

Unlike an entrepreneurial journey, sales representatives enter an already existing journey — some key foundational work with product-market fit, positioning, and company leadership have already been completed. Our job is to understand and build off of the company’s existing infrastructure to scale and grow the business.

Thus, I always prioritize the pitch and presentation before deeply understanding the business — understanding the high level value proposition of the product-market fit allows us to keep the main thing the main thing.

Sales representatives do not re-invent the wheel and there’s an urgency to perform in a timely manner before expanding contribution opportuntities. Explaining the company’s value proposition in simple terms can significantly help provide context to any new information we learn — such as handling objections, working with different team members, how the service works, and how the customers interact with the service.

Understanding the pitch provides the foundation for the sales representatives to learn the right information about the company — the five other P’s — through trial and error.

When starting any new endeavor, how do you identify what to prioritize?