Sitting on the fifteenth floor of the Morgan Stanley building in Tampa, the sunset was stunning…well that’s what I overheard my manager say from his corner office as I sat in my cubicle making final adjustments to a complicated investment model. I was still suffering PTSD from a misplaced comma earlier in the day that nearly made a six digit loss for a client. If you think this was the moment I knew finance wasn’t for me, you would be wrong.
The following morning on a trip to the proverbial water-cooler to take a break, my manager called me into his office to tell me we were going out to lunch following a meeting with a bond salesman. This was great news indeed. Instead of working through lunch I would get a decent meal and rest my eyes from the screens. What I didn’t know was that this lunch would forever change my career path and help me discover things about myself I never knew.
From the pinstripe suit, to the Patek Philip watch, all the way down to the Louis Vuitton wingtips, the bond salesman’s conversational skills were about as smooth as the silk of his Hermes tie. What I noticed more than anything else was his personality and how it flowed seamlessly into the job he had: selling financial products to large institutions. Somehow it had never crossed my mind that sales was even a part of the finance world. Besides being blown away by the pure realization of the reach of sales, and how financial sales representatives work, my first thought was “wow, if ever there was a job for me, sales of some sort must be it”.
I put myself in his shoes (thankfully not literally, as I would immediately be broke) and realized that my relational and communication skills along with my ability to build and maintain relationships were a perfect match for sales. Up until this point I had never considered sales as a career at all, yet after this interaction it was all I could think about. While I ended up enjoying the internship as a whole and learned a lot about financial advising, this one interaction was enough to completely change my outlook on job searching and my plans for the future. I sometimes wonder if anyone else in sales has ever had an experience similar to mine. Did you have a sales epiphany that reshaped the direction of your career?
testacr22
That’s so great that you had an opportunity to practice your relational skills for sales, as it is just as much as the process of being a good businessman. Even though you saw aspects of things that probably were not part of a normal sales gig, I’m sure the experience was still invaluable for you.
As a finance major, I really enjoyed your post. Personally, I want to pursue a career path in the analytical side of finance rather than financial planning/advising, but I like how you brought up the sales aspect of finance. I feel like this side of finance is often overshadowed by numbers, formulas, and excel sheets.