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Graham Trickey,
Editor, Graduate Prospects
- July 2008.
Blue-chip companies receive numerous graduate applications for their sales jobs. An alternative route into top companies is provided by organisations that select and train recruits for them. One such is Pareto Law whose clients include many household names as well as some up-and-coming entrepreneurial firms. Pareto Law’s Business Development Director, Arron Taylor, puts the spotlight on blue-chip careers.
Firstly, Arron, what is Pareto Law about?
I remember when I left university I was looking to embark on a sales career myself. The problem was that I grew up in the backwaters of Derbyshire and I’d got no commercial experience. Often you are in a Catch 22 situation – you can’t get a sales job without experience, but how are you to get any experience without a sales job? It’s frustrating – I spent the best part of six months knocking out 25 applications a week and everybody was saying: go and get some experience and come back to us.
Now at Pareto Law we very much offer that portal and introduction to the world’s finest companies who value our assessment process and the training that supports it. We run weekly Apprentice-esque assessment days to identify the UK’s brightest graduates and their competencies for sales. We then place those individuals within businesses, and then train them on how to sell.
I always remember a frustration when I was applying that a lot of organisations, particularly blue-chips, would specify that you must have at least a 2:1 or a certain number of UCAS points. In my opinion they probably missed out on some very talented graduates because of that.
Pareto Law doesn’t specify any particular degree discipline or classification. We’re looking for competencies rather than any particular background:
- Confidence and personality
- Communication skills
- The ability to influence and persuade
- Structure and logic
- Drive and dynamism
What do graduate sales people do in blue-chip companies?
It could either be new business focused or managing existing accounts; it could be working directly with clients or through ‘the channel’. For instance, if you have an IT company like Microsoft, they have what they call a reseller channel of organisations accredited to sell Microsoft products. So in a sales job at Microsoft you might be increasing revenue and profit through other organisations that sell the Microsoft suite to customers.
If we look at some other blue-chip organisations, Nestle, for instance, tends to have account management roles, while at Siemens it’s a blend of account management and the hunter-type roles winning new business. It depends on the particular marketplace and industry.
 If someone joins one of our clients they might be generating new business opportunities to start with - so they could be getting on the phone, introducing that company’s products and services to new prospective clients and setting up appointments for more senior people. After a time they might then go out and shadow more senior people meeting prospective clients, until they are ready to go it alone.
Very few companies would expect you to deliver any profit or revenue from the first couple of months. It would be unfair to do that, especially given the amount of training that we would encourage our clients to offer.
What about pay?
It depends on the industry. The fmcg (fast-moving consumer goods) market place and the pharmaceutical medical sales arena tend to pay bigger base salaries. However, you have less opportunity to earn the big commissions of certain other industries such as IT and telecoms. I’ve placed graduates within the IT arena who have got six-figure salaries whereas you could never possibly earn that with some of our fmcg clients in cereals or confectionery.
What are the blue-chip opportunites for promotion?
In our experience clients are not just looking for the short term: the fee they pay to Pareto Law is an investment in the individual recruit’s future. According to the Association of Graduate Recruiters, training, development and succession planning are the highest priority on graduates’ wish lists. Therefore all our opportunities carry an opportunity to progress.
The kind of individuals we’re looking for don’t want to stagnate in the same job for the next five years. We’re looking for people who can go on to become the future business leaders of their organisation. And it works: I can think of graduates who I’ve placed in telesales roles who are now sales directors of those businesses and they’ve made it in as little as five or six years.
Is a blue-chip career really the best option?
The only preconception a graduate may often have is that they want to work for a blue-chip. Perhaps when they were 17 a careers adviser told them blue-chips are established organisations and have the best training. But I would prefer to work for a smaller, more entrepreneurial company. That’s not to say that there aren’t some phenomenal opportunities in blue-chips but it’s not exclusive to them.
One big plus about the blue-chip organisations that we work with is that they are the brand names. Everybody’s heard of Barclays, Fedex or Procter and Gamble. They all have kudos and reputation.
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