 What's happening guys? It's Shane here and today I'm going to be talking about one of my favorite careers. It's called Sales Development Representative also known as Tech Sales, Software Sales, and Business Development Representative. All of those are basically the same thing and the reason this is one of my favorite careers is because it basically meets every single criteria that I have and I have a lot of them. For instance, there's a relatively low barrier to entry so you can actually get into this career without a college degree and without any experience so you can switch over from another career that you're not happy with. On top of that it doesn't take very long to get into it usually about less than six months sometimes a year at most and you can get paid a lot right away and then on top of that you can get paid even more once you have a little bit of experience. It's also extremely flexible and it has a skill set that you can carry over into other careers or if you want to start a business. Now when I was researching this I came across somebody who was able to become a sales development representative at a very young age 19 years old and then once he became one and had some success with it he actually started teaching other people how to get into it as well. His name is Troy and I reached out to him tried to get him to come on the channel and I was able to do it so without further ado let's go ahead jump right into the interview now. What's happening guys it's Shane here welcome back to the channel and today I am very excited to welcome Troy. Troy is a special guest mind I tried to get him on the channel because I saw some of his work online and basically he has a really cool story which I'm going to have him share with you he is in tech sales thank you for coming on the channel Troy. Yeah thanks for introducing me Shane I'm really excited to talk with you and share my passion for technology sales and really helping more people break into this amazing industry. Awesome well let's jump right into it share your story with the audience. Yeah so I really started my career in technology sales at just 18 years old so I was contemplating whether I should go to college or not and as you can imagine as an 18 year old it's a really high pressure decision it's like should I go to college should I go into debt we'll actually be able to utilize the education that I go to college for or are there other paths to start a great career so I was really trying to try to think through that and 18 years old I decided there had to be a better way I want to start my career in sales I just need to figure out how to get my foot in the door and I realized that technology sales is this really booming industry it pays great the career paths amazing so I just have to figure out how to get my foot in the door so and I was able to figure it out so I was able to get my foot in the door with a small startup and I was able to start as an intern making about 15 bucks an hour quickly got promoted to a full-time technology sales rep where I was at 18 years old no debt able to very comfortably support myself in downtown Atlanta paying for everything so no need to rely on my parents anymore which is pretty nice and by age 19 got promoted to a an account executive actually an enterprise account executive so imagine sitting at boardroom meetings closing large six-figure deals taking in some really healthy five-figure commission checks so it felt pretty nice to be that young and really achieve some success very quickly but I realized most people can't do this because it's extremely difficult to start your career without college since pretty much all companies are gonna want to require that degree especially just to get your foot in the door it's like every single job posting it's gonna say four-year degree required so I wanted to figure out a way to help more people get into this industry really as a college alternative without requiring necessary previous experience or degree and I realized the way to do that is by creating internships for non-college students so what I realized is the main barrier to entry is people that can't start a professional career without college because they cannot get an internship without college so what I did is I created this business called course careers where we take people train them online in technology sales partner directly with companies and create these internships and then we make that connection so we connect our students that we trained directly with these internships at companies and now we have a bunch of 18 19 year olds people switching their careers in their 40s everyone transitioning into technology sales so that's really really my story got it awesome well let's jump right into it uh usually there's a few things that I really like to focus on with these careers and ask people about when they're in their careers and I think the most important one out of all this is actually even more important than salary in my opinion is demand so can you talk a little bit about the demand for people who are really good at technology sales and software sales yes that's what's really crazy about this career is when you think about high demand careers you're probably thinking about software development maybe careers and the trades what a lot of people don't realize is that technology sales is actually one of the most in-demand careers the last time I checked there was over 400 000 open positions in the U.S. alone and these aren't just like retail positions where you're making minimum wage these positions pay really well and employers are really struggling to hire these people specifically because there's no standardized path to break into these careers you can't just go to college and major in tech sales so companies really struggle to hire talent they have a ton of open positions some companies are looking to hire a hundred plus of these people at any given time so it's the demand is out of this world awesome and then the second big question that everybody always wants to know what can you expect to get paid in this career so first of all like what can you expect to get paid kind of right off the bat you know first year or so and then what can you expect to get paid after maybe like a few years three years yeah so a lot of people think that some of the highest paying careers you can go into are engineering and for the most part they're right with the exception of sales so specifically in this career I mean at least the way we do it is we partner with companies we create these internships right and these are paid internships usually the companies pay anywhere between 15 to 20 an hour and that's what you're going to make usually for the first three months and then once you get that initial work experience and really prove yourself after that three months you can expect to get promoted to a permanent technology sales rep where the average starting salary is around 60,000 and in some cases companies are actually paying as much as 80,000 starting so if you can imagine that your first year you don't need a degree don't need experience you're making between 60 to 80,000 dollars in this position and a lot of companies are hiring fully remote too so you don't even need to work in an office or live in an expensive city that's pretty awesome and I've told this story kind of on my channel a few times before but I always say there's certain skills that I think are incredibly valuable coding is definitely one of them because you can leverage you know one person create can create a piece of software that millions of people can use marketing is another skill that's incredibly valuable whether or not you become a marketer or not you can probably use it other areas of your life but maybe even a more valuable skill than that guys is sales like I recommend everybody does a sales job at least one time in their life and I've told this story on my channel before I did sales while I was in high school in college and it was actually my favorite job ever okay so I had a ton of fun doing that job I learned so much I got to come out of my shell I was like a big time introvert and I got to come out of myself by doing that sales job so I recommend that everybody at least try a sales job at least once in your life you might not decide that you want to do it for the rest of your life but sales can be amazing for the right type of person it's not for everybody but it can be amazing for the right type of person now with that being said tech sales specifically technology is the industry that has the most opportunity I've talked about that on the channel quite a bit as well finance also has quite a bit of opportunity as well but technology is really they're king right now especially when you consider the work-life balance side of things you know you don't have to work like 80 to 100 hours a week like you wouldn't finance so when you combine a super super good skill set like sales and then you do that in an industry like technology you can see these just ridiculous numbers where you're making 60 80 thousand dollars in your first year hundred thousand dollars a few years in there's a another fellow youtuber who does tech sales he made over 500 thousand dollars I might try to get him on the channel at some point you might know who I'm talking about and yeah it's just you can see ridiculous numbers it's not for everybody but it can be absolutely phenomenal so I just wanted to kind of point that out really quickly so what are some of the salaries because I know that you are actually partnered with companies and you literally help your students get positions with those companies so what are some of the salaries that those companies are paying your students yeah so really on the the low end you're looking at starting around 60k in your first in on a high end around 80k so for example one of the companies we partner with is done in brad street they're looking to hire over a hundred of our students this year alone and they pay between 65 to 80k starting depending on how well you interview and that's really just starting so one of the companies we partner with another one they're one of the best technology companies to work for in florida called know before so they're a cyber security company and I was talking with their svp senior vice president of enterprise sales and he was telling me how some of his top technology sales reps they're pulling in between 400 to $700,000 a year in florida so if you can imagine living in florida and making that kind of money it's like what other careers can you do this I don't think you can do that in engineering you really have to be at the top of your game and perhaps finance or as a surgeon just to be able to to compare with these top technology sales reps so the amount of money and potential you can make in this industry is ridiculous and what's more fun than taking executives out to dinner and getting paid to literally whine and dine them so just all around amazing career with amazing pay I think one thing we kind of didn't go over and that's my bad for for not asking you this but so there's tech sales and then there's a couple other different words for it especially if they want to look up the demand for this there's sales development representative business development representative and then software sales is another keyword that they used to kind of look it up but they all fall under generally like the same umbrella for the most part so what exactly is it so I you know and what I'm kind of getting at is I know some sales jobs are kind of like business to customer this type of sales job is a little bit different it's not like you're some sort of like sleazy car salesman used car salesman right you're actually selling to businesses so it's a b2b type sales job so you can kind of talk about that a little bit yeah for sure so a lot of people they have this bad taste in their mouth when they hear oh I don't want to be a sales person because they're thinking oh they're just going to be working at some retail stores selling cell phones or working at a used car dealer trying to convince people to to buy some secondhand car when in reality you're in professional sales you're selling to companies uh and what sales really is it means solving problems so companies they have a ton of problems and these problems are really complex so they don't really know how to solve these problems and in many cases they don't even know these problems exist because they don't have the expertise to even identify them so you as a sales person you're really acting more as like a consultant so what that means is you're the person who helps them figure out how they have these problems and then pinpoint a solution that hopefully turns out to be your product your software your technology product and now you solve their problems which in turn is going to help their business save money or ultimately make money so really you're you're solving problems and maybe an example I could give real quick is let's say you're a call center business right you got 100 employees all answering the phone helping customers solve some of the issues they may be having as that call center you're going to need a way to route calls to the right employees handle tickets follow up on support requests all these different tasks you'll need to be doing as a business and you're really going to need some sort of software managing all that on the back end so if this company currently isn't using something or if they're using something that might not be working so well you as a sales rep can go to that call center and say hey I have this piece of software that's going to better route your calls better manage all your tickets and ultimately help your customers be happier which is going to generate more revenue from every customer making you all this money which pays for my software and that could be $100,000 a $500,000 deal and you as a sales rep you're going to get paid when they purchase it from you so you're really you're literally getting paid to help people solve their problems which is just incredible awesome and then I know that you have a free training where you basically you know if somebody is questioning like hey I'm not sure if this is right for me or something like that you have a free training that will kind of answer that question so you want to kind of talk about that a little bit yeah so our business course careers I mean we train you online and technology cells connect you with these companies and exchange the companies they drop their degree and they drop their experience requirements for students who finish our course so literally no no requirements at all to get your foot to the door we have 18 year olds and 19 year olds who have barely ever had a job before find success with our program and now we're on track make a 60k in the first year and we put together this free introduction course this free training course that really teaches you the whole nine yards about what being a technology sales rep involves so what your day-to-day would actually be like what can you expect from the initial training what kind of background and qualifications you need to be successful so you put this whole training together it's on our website coursecareers.com or completely free and Shane do you have a link in the comments yeah I will go ahead I'll put a link in the description I'll put it in the comments and if the YouTube system allows me I might put something like up here I'm actually not sure if they allow me to do that but yeah I'll try to do that as well yes I went through the training as well and it's it's really good it's yeah it was it was actually really insightful in fact I'm using that training in order to make a video script I texted you about it so that I have permission I'm actually using some of the some of the stats from that training in order to write one of my scripts so it's really good training very in depth so I put a whole lot of work into that and like I said there's really there's no specific background that you need to be successful in this position anyone can do it so if it sounds interesting to you definitely check out that the introduction course and go through the free training all right and then I think just one last thing one of the big reasons why I wanted to get you on this channel is because I saw some of the interviews you had with your students and I saw some of the results you were getting them and you know I've been doing this whole thing like helping people find their ideal careers for quite some time now and you know typically if you can get somebody a job in like six months to a year especially if it's a job without any experience that's actually good like a lot of the times you know boot camps for coding and all that sort of thing they'll say like hey we can get you a job within 18 months or like 12 months but there are some circumstances where you're literally getting people a job within one month before the course is even over which is just totally ridiculous so can you kind of just talk about maybe some specific examples and then just generally speaking how long it's taking a lot of your students to get jobs for sure yeah I think the demand from employers it is what really makes this process so quick just because the demand is out of this world and employers really need to hire quickly so maybe a few examples I'll give you so one example is one of our students he was working as a janitor for the past two years dropped out of college was 24 years old literally this person you would have had no idea uh just a month or a couple months later in his case he'd be working in technology sales on track to make around 80 000 in his first year so I think more than more than tripling his his current salary and now having full benefits and working fully remote so technology sells us not a extremely complex career so we actually have a lot of students who complete our entire course in around 20 days and a week later they have a job offer which is crazy because even if you look at boot camps maybe the training let's say it lasts one year they'll throw out the expectation that it might take six months to land a position where currently we're averaging between one to two weeks for multiple job offers and the big reason for that is because we partner with all these employers that drop all of their requirements for the students who finish our program so right once you finish you're interviewing with a ton of companies literally as many companies as you want to interview with that's what we can get you in front of because we're partnering with a ton of companies every single week and our average student within just one to two weeks of finishing is walking out with multiple job offers so they can really optimize for the company and the position that they like the best so it's just yeah really compared to other careers the time to get your foot in the door and start making a ton of money it's unparalleled compared to anything else all right well thank you again for coming on the channel that was really awesome I am going to try to get some of your students on the channel in the future might be a little bit later on from when this interview gets posted just because I'm traveling and stuff but again guys free training is going to be down in the description below also in the pinned comment and if you do decide to take his course I do have a coupon code it's going to be $50 off I believe it's Shane 50 or 50 Shane I'm pretty sure it's Shane 50 but I'll have that in the comment and the description down below as well so thanks again Troy for coming on what you're doing is super super awesome but yeah thanks again so much for coming on the channel Troy I really appreciate it thanks again Shane I really appreciate you having me