 But by being in this situation, it has motivated me to say, I need to work harder, I need to get more creative, I need to find more ways to make money add value. And by joining software sales, it allows you to quickly forex your income. And it's not a joke, it's real, it's out there and there's a lot of money for the taking. What's happening guys, it's Shane here. And in today's video, I'm gonna be interviewing Trent. Now, Trent is four to five years into his career in tech sales. Now, tech sales is one of my top ranked careers. It's one that I recommend to quite a few people. It's great for people who either want to skip college or they're in a career and they want to transition into a different one without any experience. And so Trent is a great example of what you can get to about four to five years into your career if you go into tech sales. Now, spoiler alert, Trent is in a career that he loves and he makes over $200,000 a year. And he's gonna share his story in tech sales all the way from beginning when he first discovered it to now where he is in a position where he's making over $200,000 a year and just killing it. So I really appreciate Trent for coming on the channel. Let's go ahead and jump into it right now right after you gently tap that like button. Let's aim for 1,000 likes on this video. Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. It's Shane here and today I have another very special guest. I got a fellow YouTuber on the channel. I brought Trent on the channel and he actually has a YouTube channel where he talks about software sales, tech sales, business development representative, software development representative, basically everything under that umbrella. So thank you so much for coming on the channel, Trent. 50,000 cold calls, 600 posted videos. I'm excited to be here and speak with your audience today, Shane. That's awesome. Yeah, I love how you lead with that. That is impressive, 50,000 cold calls. I'm honestly just trying to even imagine how long that would take to do. That is seriously impressive. But we're gonna go ahead, start off at the very beginning and I'm gonna kinda ask you about your story. So Trent, back in the day before you became a software developer, I think you became a business development representative at first before you got into tech sales, before you even knew what tech sales was, let's take it all the way back and let's talk about how you discovered the career of tech sales. Tech sales is without a doubt one of the best careers available to anyone on today. And I had no clue what it was until at least 21, 22, my senior year of college. I'm from Columbus, Ohio, went to Ohio University, was the only school I got accepted into, very average public university. And I was pretty misguided early on, partied, played a lot of Xbox, I was obsessed with NBA 2K, Madden, until I eventually got surrounded by other people who were smarter than me, who had bigger goals than me. And then I started to learn how to study and get involved in student organizations. So what happened was I met one of my friends in the business school and I said, hey man, what do you wanna do? And he said, I wanna be an enterprise account executive. And I said, that sounds really cool, I think I wanna do that too. So I went home and I Googled it and I said, enterprise account executive, technology, software sales, not many people from my school got into tech. And I still didn't entirely understand what it was. When my senior year came around, I said, okay, I need to get a job, what's low-hanging fruit, I wanna go anywhere besides Ohio, I wanna do sales, I wanna be in a big city. So I went to the career fair, there were five companies out of 46 that were hiring for sales jobs outside of Ohio. And I got super lucky being the only person from my school hired, basically the best tech company that was there, super fast growing. And I basically locked my way into software sales. And I had no clue what I was getting myself into. And then time goes by and you make 50,000 cold calls and now we're a veteran. I never had an internship, I had no connections and technology, I had nobody saying, hey, this is the way, this is what to do. I just had a goal of getting a sales job in a big city anywhere outside of the state of Ohio. So I moved myself to Dallas, Texas and I show up day one and I have no clue what an SDR is. It stands for Sales Development Representative. And if you hope to get in software sales, the entry level role is Sales Development Representative or Business Development Representative. They're basically the same thing. And the goal is to basically prospect, cold call, do whatever it takes to set up meetings with companies to generate pipeline. And we'll get into what that means in a moment, but you're basically prospecting cold calling and doing all you can to generate interest to sell your product or service to the market. So I show up day one, they hand me a headset and they train me and they say, hey, this is what our solution does. These are the people that might be interested in buying it, go set up meetings with them. So I start cold calling, I start sending emails and I wasn't naturally good at it. I really struggled my first month, I was one of the worst performing reps and everyone in sales will inevitably have that moment. If it doesn't work out, I'll just go work for the competitor and they'll pay me more and they'll give me the next promotion. It's, hey, I'm gonna make this work no matter what. And that's how I was able to go into an SDR position, tech sales, no connections, no internships, no experience and really start to figure out over time. And four years later, I promoted from a entry-level SDR to a senior account executive for X Y income and I know we're gonna talk about the money in a bit. Got it, really, really good points there. I do wanna clarify one thing. For software sales, do you recommend getting a degree or is this something that you can just get into without a degree? Most of the leading companies that are hiring have that line item that they mandate a bachelor's degree. But I do know that there are alternative paths in our friend Troy at Course Career Connect, excuse me. They provide a great alternative education path to help people with no degree get in. So the barriers to entry are lower than some other career paths. You don't need a degree, but I would say it's gonna be a lot easier to get in with a degree. Got it, and speaking of Course Careers, if you do wanna learn more about software sales, Troy does have a really good introductory course where he kinda teaches you how Course Careers works, how he was able to get companies to drop that degree requirement. And basically what Course Careers is, is he will train you in tech sales as a SDR BDR and then he actually helps you to get internships with companies. So he essentially will get you interviews with companies and it has a ridiculously high success rate because in your first week after graduating two weeks, you're probably gonna have like somewhere between five to seven interviews. So pretty good chance that you're gonna be able to land one of those jobs. So you wanna check that out and see how Course Careers works. I'm gonna go ahead and put that down in the description as well as the pinned comment. If you do decide to use Troy's service, I do have a $50 coupon that is gonna be Shane 50. I'll put that down in the description and the comment. And I'll add to that Shane. So I had Troy on my podcast and I've researched a lot of these tech sales boot camps and one of the leading ones, I went and looked at the faculty and their head instructor of content has never done sales before and they take a percentage of your income when you get hired, it's crazy to me. It's almost like stealing and preying on people that need the help. So Troy does it a little bit differently and I've seen some incredible success stories as well. Folks going from janitors to 70K, your tech sales job. So definitely worth checking out if you find yourself in that category of no bachelor degree but you wanna get into this profession, absolutely. Yeah, I think it's a great option for people who either wanna skip college, they went to college but they got a degree that doesn't really help them get jobs too much or they went to college, they got a degree and they're in a career where they're not really happy with it. It's not really fulfilling or satisfying and they wanna try another career out where they don't have to go back to college for four or five years, you can get into it and learn on the job. So those are kind of the three categories of people who I see tech careers and tech sales in general just being a good option for. Okay, so we talked about your first job. Can you take us through the progression of the jobs or the positions that you've had within tech sales? As we discussed the entry-level role in tech sales, software sales, and we use those interchangeably. I look at tech sales as an umbrella. When I say software sales, it's SaaS, software as a service. There's other aspects of tech sales which could be infrastructure as a service. An example would be AWS at Amazon. So I work in SaaS software as a service. The entry-level position is SDR, sales development representative, and or BDR, business development representative. Both of them are responsible for basically taking the product to market, generating pipeline. And what I mean by pipeline is let's say I call you Shane and I wanna sell you my software, I give you a call and you're interested in learning more. So maybe we agree to set up a demo and whatever the potential deal value would be, let's say I would sell my software to you for $5,000. The pipeline amount would be $5,000 because that's what we may be able to sell the deal for. When you master all things prospecting, cold calling, pipeline generation, communication, you will promote up to an AE, which stands for Account Executive. You still have to generate pipeline. You still have to cold call. It's never going away. And that's why I love doing it so much. You also are now responsible for actually closing revenue. You are working deals. You are running sales cycles, meaning whenever my SDR calls you and sets up the initial meeting, I will enjoy and run it with you. And we will do a discovery call. So I'm trying to understand, Shane, what is your pain? We need more viewership. We need more subscribers. We need more everything. So that's the pain. So I'm gonna say, well, my solution, well, I absolutely help with that. So I wanna show it to you. We're gonna go to a demo and then we're gonna negotiate and then we're gonna close the deal. So that's what an Account Executive does. I close deals. I sell to other companies. And I do this all day, every day. And it's a lot of fun because I work large deals with organizations that you know of, that you go eat at, that you go buy products from. For example, most of the water bottles, I'm not gonna say the brand, but I work with the manufacturer of those water bottles. And it's cool to, you start to drive around and you say, wow, I work with that brand. I see them. And yeah, you're looking at it. So we're not giving any free plugs. There are no sponsors today. But as an Account Executive, I'm four years of my career. I forexed my income going from SDR to a senior Account Executive. And the next level up is what's called an Enterprise Account Executive. This means you are working with the biggest brands in the world, the Fortune 500 companies and at my company, organizations that do more than $5 billion in revenue, that's considered an Enterprise Organization. So you need to reach the Enterprise Account Executive tier, basically, which is usually anywhere from six to 10 years of experience to really have the capacity to do these sales motions because they are so complicated. And that's when the big bucks really start to get into play because you're making minimum $250,000 a year. And I'm happy to walk through each of the earning thresholds at each of those. But that's if you're an individual contributor staying as a sales rep. A lot of people are interested in leadership. So you absolutely can go a leadership route, which looks a little bit different and the pay will vary as well. It just comes down to, are you a peer hunter? Do you just wanna go make it happen? Or do you really enjoy helping? You have to enjoy helping people, but if you really wanna help people advance and blossom in their career, then a leadership path may be for you. All right, so the most important question, the question everybody wants to know, let's talk about the money now. I'm not sure how comfortable you are with the exact numbers. If you're not comfortable telling me your exact numbers, you can always tell me just generally speaking what people can expect with an entry level role, maybe one year in, two years in, three years in, account executive versus SDR, whatever you're comfortable with, but let's talk about the money. Let's talk about the money. Ultimately, that's what everyone cares about. That's what it's been building towards because the reason why we work is hopefully you enjoy it and the more you enjoy it, the better you're gonna be at it. When I started as an SDR right out of college, my on-target earning was $50,000. And keep in mind, this is four years ago. This is a long time ago. Inflation pay has increased. So my base pay was $40,000. My base pay was $40,000. My variable pay was $10,000. That lasted for about six months. I basically made $65,000 my first year. And what you'll see is there's a trend if I've always outperformed my on-target earning because that is what a performance-based career afford you. You can make more money than you're expected to make. Most of these ordinary careers that most people go to college for, you don't have the ability to make more than you're expected to make. You're basically in a system and you're limited. With sales, if you perform, you promote and you get paid. When I promoted to an SDR too, my on-target earning increased to, I believe, $65,000. So my base pay increased and my variable pay, my commission increased. My second year, so at age 23-ish, right out of college, I ended up making about $85-ish, $1,000, give or take, which I was pumped about. I believe that money is just numbers on a screen. It's nice to make. You want to be in the right place. But by being in this situation, it has motivated me to say, I need to work harder. I need to get more creative. I need to find more ways to make money add value. And by joining software sales, it allows you to quickly forex your income. And it's not a joke. It's real. It's out there and there's a lot of money for the taking. Got it. So you forexed your income. So what are you making at this time? So my on-target earning is $207,000 this year in my current position. I get paid out twice a month and the commission is basically, whatever I close in revenue this month, I get paid out in two months. So there's not an exact number of this is exactly what I'm making because it fluctuates. But at the end of the year, I anticipate to make well over $200,000 at age 26. That is incredible. And it just seems to be going up every single year. If you look at the graph, it's just going up, up, up every single year. So the sky's the limit. And like you said, you've got a lot of room for vertical growth. If you want to continue with sales, got a lot of room for horizontal growth. If you want to start your own business or move into a different position, more leadership sort of thing, that's extremely impressive. And that's what's possible when you have a very valuable skill set, which is sales. You combine that with an industry that has probably the most opportunity out of any industry in the world, which is technology. So you combine those two things together and magical things happen. And if you think about industry, imagine the people everybody looks up to in society. And Mark Zuckerberg, I'm not saying everyone has a favorable opinion. You have Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk. They're all tech founders. I believe everything is shifting in the early 2000s. It was hedge funds. It was, okay, these big money guys. VCs play a role in this too. But if you're good in finance, you're basically selling your soul and working terrible hours like you talked about. Whereas tech's a little bit more progressive. You have the cafeteria, you have the ping pong tables, and you're not completely selling your soul and you can still have some work-life balance in tech because they value that as a culture because that's the only way to actually attract and retain the best talent. That's a great point. And a lot of the talent that would be going into law or finance is now going into tech because they see that it's great no matter what career path you choose. Like if you choose to start your own business, it's great. Technology is a great industry to start a business in. If you choose to rise up as a salesperson, for instance, that's great. There's a lot of room for vertical growth. You can make over a million dollars a year in tech sales. Like there are people in tech sales that make well over a million a year. If you wanna kind of go the executive route, more of the corporate route, if that's the lifestyle you'd like, there's a lot of room for growth there as well. So yeah, I definitely agree with you there. And yeah, tech, it's not even debatable. It's definitely the best industry. I would argue there's one industry that's more recession-proof than tech and that is healthcare. Healthcare is more recession-proof without a doubt than any other industry. And then also working in the government. And I have a video coming out on that as well. So working for the government and healthcare are probably the two most recession-proof industries, but tech is up there. Tech is relatively safe as well, just because I think a lot of the big companies when the layoffs do come, they're gonna see this as an opportunity to acquire the best talent, right? They're gonna see it as a competitive advantage for them to be able to pick up really good talent from the companies that do decide to lay people off because they know the recession is probably only gonna last maybe a year, two years at most, something like that. And at the end of those two years, yeah, maybe they lost some money. They, you know, expenses got a little bigger. They're not making as much money, but they were able to acquire extra talent. So in the long run, they're gonna end up winning. And that's really what they wanna do. They're definitely more like future focused typically in tech. So what I've seen in the marketplace is I think people have gotten lazy. And I think people have gotten entitled as well. You have this great resignation tailwind. A lot of people saying, I'm not happy where I'm at today. I'm not seeing the career progression. I'm gonna go take this job that pays me $10,000 more a year, whatever it may be. And a lot of people have been shifting around. Everyone's calling for remote work, which I work remotely three days a week. I go into the office two days a week. But a lot of people are also refusing to go back to the office. And I think all of these signs are gonna catch up and it's gonna hit abruptly. A lot of companies are gonna lay off. A lot of people are gonna get reality checks and the talent is naturally gonna rise. So for those of you who have been putting the work, who have been focused on getting better, it's gonna pay off in the long run and you need to be in the right vehicle, such as tech, finance, like we're talking about so that you can get appropriately compensated based on your skillset because it's all about the opportunity vehicle you're in, not just how good you actually are. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the channel, Trent, and sharing your knowledge. Definitely go check out Trent's channel again. I'll have it pop up on the screen. I'll put it down in the description below as well. And yeah, so thank you so much again. Go connect with me on LinkedIn too, guys. I'm happy to help however I can. Awesome, have a good one.