Career Path of a Director of Sales at DHL

"Hey Luigi. Could you walk me through your career path, starting with your experiences in college? Any internships or jobs you had prior to your current role? Specifically, can you share how you landed that first job?"

"Yes, absolutely. So when I was in undergrad, I was a philosophy major. I wanted to go into law school because of my issues with immigration. So my only internship was a legal internship at the law firm that represented my family."

"I did that throughout my senior year of college, and then they actually hired me on afterwards into a paralegal slash business development manager position. So that was cool because I got to really evaluate if I wanted to go to law school. From the business development manager standpoint, I got to start developing business acumen, understanding where customers are coming from, what we can do to close customers, our conversion ratios, and stuff like that."

"Throughout that time, I learned that although I was passionate about my immigration situation, I was not necessarily passionate about immigration law overall. And I reached out to one of my best friends who was working at DHL at the time, who while I was graduating. Let me back up a little bit. Once I realized that I didn't want to go into law school, I started trying to think, 'How can I leverage this philosophy degree into a corporate setting?'"

"I initially started looking into HR-type roles, and I was getting rejection after rejection. Then I was just sharing my struggles with my friends. Meanwhile, one of my good friends had gotten a job at DHL right after college as an inside sales rep, and he had progressed relatively quickly within the organization. So he kept saying, 'Hey, come out and work at DHL.' I didn't think logistics and philosophy were necessarily a one-to-one match, but it ended up working out great."

"So, yeah, my first position was inside sales. And you want me to go through the career path? Yep. So I started in inside sales, and I did that for pretty much a year. Then I moved into leadership as a lead qualification supervisor. So when I was in inside sales, I managed a territory of Manhattan. It was a small but dense geography."

"When I went into my first leadership role as lead qualification supervisor, there was a team of up to 32 lead qualification reps who would essentially call cold, warm, or hot across the United States to get essentially a meeting for one of our reps. I did that for about two and a half years, but during that time, I really leveraged the internal network of DHL and tried to expand myself within the sales organization by just meeting people."

"Where we were was called the CRC, the Customer Relationship Center. It housed inside sales and customer service. So I was able to form a really good relationship with the senior director of sales, the vice president of customer service, and the senior director of IT. I got into First Choice, which is process improvement. If you've ever heard of Six Sigma or Lean, it's essentially DHL's equivalent of that."

"So then I was able to kind of navigate within those three different functions and run different initiatives that kind of combined and drew the forces of everybody in-house together. Which led to us developing new sales tools and a bunch of new lead prospecting methods and tools. So I did that for two and a half years, and I did a bunch of stretch assignments, which is essentially doing a role to see if you like it or not."

"So I ended up doing a stretch assignment into another leadership position, area sales manager of inside sales. It's essentially I was managing what my first role was. So I had that personal experience, and I could coach people up because I was there. So I did that for about a year and a half. Then I moved to downtown Los Angeles and did field sales, which is essentially account management, like knocking on doors and expanding territory."

"Again, it was another small but dense territory. It was very similar to the territory that I had in New York. So I was dealing primarily with fashion, fine arts, and finance. I did that for a year and a half, through COVID. During COVID, I took a promotion into an area sales manager role, where then I was again leading what I did in the field. So where I was knocking on doors, I was now managing that team. And then during that process, that role got leveled up to a director position."

"So, yeah, I was director of field sales and major accounts. So customers were kind of like Mom and Pop shops that were doing between $1,500 and $40,000 [per month], and then also major accounts that were doing $40,000 and above."