Can Project Management Skills Help Your Medical Sales Career?

3 Jul, 2018

You’re about to step into a career in medical sales, and if all goes well, you’ll impress potential employers and grab the first rung of the ladder by landing a position as a sales rep. There’s just one thing standing in your way: You lack years of direct, in-depth sales experience. If you’re making the leap to sales from another profession or another industry altogether, you’re certainly not alone. Countless job seekers make this move every year, drawn to sales positions by the lure of benefits and high salary ceilings. But to get your foot in the door, you’ll need to leverage your background, skills and previous responsibilities. For example – project management experience. If you have it, use it. Here’s how.

Emphasize organization and time management skill

As a project manager in your previous industry, you had plenty of opportunities to strengthen your organization and time management skills. Whether you worked in agriculture, structural design, or hotel development, you learned how to break down an overarching deadline into smaller components and break complex tasks down into manageable ones. Use your resume and interview to demonstrate what you’ve learned and how you tend to approach challenges related to time management and deadline assessment.

Emphasize strategic planning skill

Your prospective employers in the sales field will also want insight into your strategic planning abilities. Can you see into the future and accurately assess what resources you’ll need to complete a project, and when you’ll need them? Can you wait patiently for something while speeding up the timeline on others? Can you take a list of urgent items and prioritize them, pushing the most critical tasks to the top and downgrading the least critical — or eliminating them altogether? Strategic planning will be essential to your success in medical sales. If you know how to draw an effective road map and follow that map to victory, make this clear.

Show you can be a leader

No matter the nature of your previous career, it probably had at least one thing in common with your future career in sales: Your success depended on the help and effort of others. You used your communication and leadership skills daily to do what needed to be done, and at this point, you’ve become an expert at delegating, deploying the right people to the right tasks and expressing your thoughts clearly so others will understand and support them. Explain how your previous career taught you the value of listening, trusting, speaking, writing and leading.

For more on how to execute a smooth career transition into sales and away from another industry, consult with the medical sales recruiters at Buckman Enochs Coss and Associates.