Let's say someone is extremely greedy and willing to take tons of rejection, ambitious, and great at sales. What's the best sales job to get into to be making 250k plus within 5 to 10 years? Obviously assuming the first 6 months or so could be ramen time.

My thoughts:

Real Estate - ok but very tough business, most fail, and have to deal with ****ty people all day

Commercial RE - better, because more money, and dealing with business people.

Financial advisor - takes a long time to get established, but seemingly endless potential. Downside is I don't really believe advisors help much, so it's mostly a scam.

Home Improvement - I've heard they cap around 150k but don't know for sure. Have to drive a lot.

Car sales - stand up all day, weekends, dealerships screw u over, basically sounds horrible



Would love to hear some other suggestions

high end hooker

My impression (and total guess) as an outsider is that the scammier the product you are selling is, the better the commission/incentives will be.

Commercial real estate, and it's really not close.

Medical device sales. That's what I'm in and make $300k/yr. It's extremely competitive and difficult to get in, but if you are smart and have drive, there are piles of money to be made.

The best sales jobs are nearly always random sales roles for random mid sized companies all over the country. It's pretty amazing to be the sales rep for a 3 state region for some random paint company basically. These companies are not good at figuring out sales comp plans and as a result it is often possible to earn hilarious amounts of money working for them in these roles.

True sales organizations aren't going to overpay you basically.

Probably stating the obvious but illegal drug sales is a pretty solid sales job.

Yeah but it really isn't. Feel free to read Freakonomics.

Some poker players I have found can really translate their skills to trading. Now I understand you're looking for sales job so maybe you should consider looking into becoming a financial adviser first to learn the industry. The way its going with the industry is fee based compensation but if you sell 2 or 3 annuities or life products your making easily 10k+ a month. I used to do this before running money and these markets always do well when markets start to top out and crash. And the great thing is you don't need 100k to start a business like this. You only need a L&H insurance liscense and if you sell variable annuities (which you really don't need to ) then you would need to work for a firm who will "sponsor" you to take the series 6 and/or 7. You can take these exams and then tell them to piss off and setup your own shop and setup whats called an RIA which you can do for less than 10k. Learn to trade though with paper money and starting taking a portion of your poker bankroll to trading real money and it will start to roll in provided you're consistently profitable.

If you don't have a degree 1st tier firms won't look at you, but you can get a job tomorrow with 3rd tier firms such as merrill edge, AXA (commission onl y), Vanguard (great benes) and have a nice salary while learning.

No one has said this, but medical device sales and drug reps can make good money.

Yep, def no one said it.

How would one go about breaking into the device/drug sales industry? Pure network?

Just want to point out that pharma is hard to break into if you're not both a bio major and a hot woman. Medical device sales is probably pretty ok, but not that easy to get into either.

^^^^this

Sales is a bitch unless you have an edge just like poker, you have a strong network of low hanging fruit to sell to in the first few months, or you don't mind spending countless hours cold calling and/or other marketing events that cost $$$. You could look to join an IMO insurance agency that doesn't kill you on splits and they provide you with PRIME leads which can cost on average between 300-700 week

Well then just become a hot woman

As someone who has been successful in a lot of different sales positions, the answer really is commercial real estate.

It is a total grind at first working in any of the big companies, but once you get your bearings and can possibly branch out on your own the commissions are very very good.

Haha, myb. Sometimes I just scan...

Yeah, a lot of my friends that did this were like pre med or other advanced degree candidates that wanted to make some money for like 2-5 years before going back to school.

Must be an awful job to do. Pretty much any cold call is a scam to some degree.

I wouldn't call it a scam but yes I agree this day in age there are better ways to reach potential clients. If you don't have money to spend several K on seminar circuit, or premium leads cold calling and other marketing is the only way to build a "book"

I always thought in comm re you start out on your own like in residential? So they make you do the bitch work for a while? That sucks. But I guess they pay a salary at least

I don't really trust myself with stocks and investing since I'm a little snakebit from the past. And with poker I'm not as much of a numbers guy as a people guy. I'm more persuasive than analytical if that makes sense. Looking at charts all day would drive me nuts.

But that said, I dont' think most financial advisors are necessarily oracles of omaha. I think a lot of them just say "diversify" and then push their stock of the month. Or something like that. But you don't need to be a financial genius to do that job. As far as setting up your own shop, that's probably the key to making a fortune

Bigger the ticket the higher the commission. However sales at engineering firms would have to be high. $1 billion contracts. The other might be private equity like Blackstone (BX).

You couldn't be more correct. I worked for a top firm and most of the investment advisors either A. didn't manage their own money or could trade, and b. they were themselves closet indexers. Most financial advisors 'outsource' the investment management, financial planning software, even client management all while collecting a fee. Setting up your own shop allows you to do whatever really (As long as its disclosed) and you don't have to break off everyone else. If you're a people person and want to make a lot of money then maybe look at the insurance route and sell fixed annuities which is an easy sell to give someone a guaranteed A rated 3% annuity that's not affected by the markets. But good luck in what you decide.