At the beginning of October, I finally realized a goal of mine that I’ve been pushing towards for over a year now. That goal was to find a job that met two criteria. 1) The job would give me a way to stay in France and 2) push me to expand my professional horizons. In that order. I was prepared to take a teaching job or even a nannying job if it came to that, but having worked in both of those capacities many, (many) times before, I was really wanting something new.
As I’ve written before, I don’t take my new job for granted
Finding a CDI position in France as a foreigner is about 70% luck and 30% bulldogish determination in my experience. But, now that I have one, I’m digging in hard and working to show my manager that he didn’t make a mistake in choosing me from all the other applicants. It’s been a little over a month now of feeling tentative and out of my element, but I think working from home has actually helped because I’m in a familiar place doing an unfamiliar thing.
In broad strokes, my job involves a lot of calling, emailing, and following up because I attempt to convince people to buy a service. I draw a bit on my experience working on the sales floor in David’s Bridal and also on my campaign experience calling voters, but I also turn to Google quite a bit with different variations of the same question: How do you convince people to want something you’re selling?
I guess the biggest thing I learned in the mad scramble to three sales (the goal set for all the company newbies last month) is that there is a massive amount of psychology, social intelligence, and randomness that goes into successfully selling via cold call. Please bear in mind that I only made two sales the first month, so there is a 33% chance that the following is bullshit. However.
Beginner’s luck is real, and I believe in it
I think that might be partially why, in the end, a man from a conversation I don’t remember having emailed saying he wanted me to go ahead with us and could I please send the contract. Then, a woman emailed me saying “let’s go for it!” in response to an email where I broke all pretense of formality and did, indeed, simply ask her if she wanted “to go for it.” Of course, this luck could also have been generated by the week I made nearly three times as many calls every day than is feasibly sustainable (case in point: the following Monday I barely cleared the single digits).
But to get a little meta-meta, if you believe in the belief of something, that energy has to go somewhere, right?
If you’ve been a newbie or are also a newbie working in business development, I’d love to hear from you! What are your impressions of the job? Do you know what you’re aiming for long term? Bonus points if you’re working abroad in a multicultural work environment.
