Sayonara, Sales Jobs

The early days of the COVID-19 pandemic were wild for a myriad of reasons. Beside all of the misinformation, panic, and political grandstanding; brick and mortar business really didn’t know what to do with themselves.

At the time I worked for a major phone carrier. Despite how I describe the evils of the business, they did actually do a great job taking care of folks whose stores were forced to close for a period of time.

For nearly a month, I was home getting paid my full salary. I had recently been promoted to assistant manager in my store, and certainly didn’t miss the amount of conference calls I typically had to take in a day between pushing my sales reps to add another line of service and trying to help close yet another TV streaming sale.

I received a text message from a friend who used to work with me at the same company. He said that he’d recently started working as a Support Specialist for a cloud hosting company based out of Philadelphia, and thought I would be a good fit for a job there.

My first question of course was, “How could I do that? I don’t have tech experience.” He told me not to worry, they’ll train me. He said that they were looking for people with good customer service skills, problem solving abilities, and the right attitude to fit in with the existing team. Naturally my second question was, “How much is your referral bonus?” We shared a laugh while he admitted that is something he’d get, but not his motivation for reaching out to me specifically.

You know what? I didn’t have anything to lose by filling out an application. I gathered some details from my friend about the nature of the work and checked out the company. While I’ve mostly worked tech-adjacent jobs, I could see that a lot of this was over my head. I’ve heard of Linux, but I’ve never attempted to use or understand it. “Don’t worry, they’ll teach you.” kept ringing in my head as I uploaded my resume.

A few days later, I get an email asking me to complete a writing sample. It included a few basic customer scenarios, similar to the type of thing a Linode customer might reach out to the Support team about. I answered them as best I could, leaning on information publicly available in their Documents Library.

I then got another email asking to set up a phone interview. I had a conversation with one of the Customer Support Managers who was very candid in describing the role, the opportunities for advancement, and the fact that they too have closed their offices in favor of remote work until the city had a course of action for reopening businesses.

Work… from home? I thought that had a nice ring to it, considering that I was used to having people spray their spittle at me from across a table while I’m handling their cell phone. I proceeded to the next stage of interview.

This time around I met with two other managers for a video call. Although I was gainfully employed and didn’t need to leave my current job, I took this seriously. I donned the top half of my interview suit and found a good neutral corner of my bedroom to be presentable in front of the camera. Not to brag (ok, maybe to brag a little), I really felt like I absolutely nailed the interview.

Some days later I got a call with an offer. Decision time: Do I take a chance in a new field and risk my stable yet demanding job? Do I politely turn them down and stay where things are familiar? After much mulling, I accepted.

I found out later that I was one of three people accepted for this role out of a pool of hundreds of applicants. It was time to grab this new bull by the horns.