Career Path Of An Outside Sales Representative At ADP

As a sophomore in college, I wasn't sure what career path I wanted. However, I knew I wanted to gain business experience to get into our business program. So, I started applying for many internships and accepted a role as a sales associate for an independent consulting firm called Business Talent Group, or BTG.

At BTG, my main responsibility was cold-calling Fortune 500 executives all day to book meetings. We needed to book five meetings per week. We also profiled those companies to prepare for those meetings. It was a tough internship, but I loved speaking with top executives from around the world. This experience truly set me up for success in my career and for getting into our business program.

I have to admit, I never thought I would enjoy sales; it was near the bottom of my list of career paths. It really surprised me how much I enjoyed the internship experience. Afterward, I joined the Sales Club and selected sales courses as electives for my degree. Ultimately, I decided to pursue a career in sales.

Towards the end of my senior year, I began applying for jobs. This was at the beginning of COVID, a difficult time to find work as most companies were laying off employees instead of hiring. I was also only applying to jobs in the LA area, making entry-level work even tougher due to my specific requirements. After many interviews, I landed an outside sales position at ADP in their LA office.

I actually started the job remotely while finishing my degree in Arizona. For five months, I was doing both: finishing my degree and working full-time. It was a lot of work, but also a really good time. I really enjoyed it.

ADP is the world's largest payroll and HR company. I was in the small business division. My job was to partner with accountants to get referrals into their book of business. However, to get referring partners, I had to start by knocking on doors and asking if they would even be open to discussing a partnership. It took months of visits and proving myself before they felt confident enough to refer me to even one business.

Building trust within those partnerships definitely takes time. The first year was pretty difficult because you're starting from scratch. You spend a lot of time cold-calling and finding business elsewhere. If you aren't getting business from referring partners, you still need to hit your quota to keep your job. Fortunately, I was pretty good at cold-calling from my internship experience at BTG. I ended up breaking a few records for how quickly and how much I sold as a new hire, which was very motivating.

Overall, the job required a lot of consistency. I was working almost every night while watching Netflix. But in the long run, it really paid off. By the end of the year, I had strong referring partnerships that were referring me very often. The following year, I didn't have to work nearly as hard, which was really nice.