I am a Territorial Manager at an online commercial real estate company. It is a market place where people can go to buy, lease out, or sell their properties. As long as it deals with commercial real estate and land, people can put it on our website. My job is to make sale calls; there are outbound sales where people go to places and sell place-to-place and there are inbound sales where they make sales on the phone. I am not a telemarketer. The people that I work with are people who are familiar with our services. I sell paid subscriptions to the website for people to sell their properties. My region is the South East of the United States so I work with a lot of people within that area.

EDUCATION | I received my BA in Advertising and Minored in Business with a focus in Marketing at San Jose State University.

HOW TO GET STARTED | You have to be resilient. The turn-over rate is very high. You have to have the ability to sell. If you don't make the numbers, you're out. Sales is not a job for everyone. If someone yells at you, you cannot be upset about it. You just have to be on top of your game; you have to be up-to-date with the market and know about commercial real estate. Also, you have to learn your customer's jargon. For example, I work with people from the South so a lot of the people I work with are Republicans, conservative and they talk slowly, whereas for me, I am a Californian that talks really quickly and I am kind of frank. You would have to be able to adapt to different types of customers no matter where they are from. Another thing is that this job includes you doing the same thing every day. The calls, the conversations, and customers are different, but the tasks are the same. You have to keep yourself motivated. It is a good thing my motivation is money.

MUST HAVE TRAITS | Resilient, easy to talk to, be able to absorb information and understand the market and sell it to your advantage, be a good listener, good speaker, and learn how to multi-task.

how I got started | I was originally interested in Public Relations because I thought it was glamorous and all about schmoozing, but then I realized that it was mostly about writing. I was also always told to do something in the medical field. I was leaning towards nursing, but I took a career class and it made me realize that Nursing wasn't for me and that Journalism was a better fit. I liked the business side of Advertising along with the idea of being able to persuade people and change their opinions on things. San Jose State University was a place where it wasn't too far nor too close from my Daly City home. SJSU was also known for their great Journalism and Mass Communications department; it is known to be better than SFSU. The most important class for Advertising is probably the Campaigns class where you act an as agency and the theme for the semester would be your client. You compete with other groups or "agencies" in that class. When I took it, our client was the California Army National Guard and I took role as Account Executive and I was in Marketing and Promotions. In order to obtain my degree, I had to also do an internship where I worked at an advertising agency called JWT in San Francisco. When I graduated, I was offered a job, which was a sweet deal because no one really gets that kind of opportunity right after college.

why this job?| I was unemployed for a while since being laid off from the first agency. I applied for many different ad agencies but the playing field for advertising jobs was competitive. Even though I worked at JWT, one of the biggest names in advertising, I was applying for entry level positions since I didn't work my way up the ladder. It was hard for me to get a job in advertising because a lot of people with more experience than me were applying for entry level jobs. Also, the ad agencies were cutting their ad spending so there weren't too many positions being available at the time. How I got into my current job started with a recruiter finding my resume on Monster.com. I worked for the recruiter for a couple of weeks and I applied for the Sales job. I chose LoopNet because of the atmosphere. At my interview, I kind of fell in love with the place and I loved everything about it. I thought it was going to be a temporary job, but it turned out to be something that I love and want to work at for a long time. This is something that was entirely the opposite of my agency job. I was a Media Buyer and had people come to me to persuade me to do business with them. Now, the people are coming to me for my business.

why I love this job!| I like how my company has a laid back atmosphere. No one makes you wear suits nor do you have to dress to impress; casual clothing is considered the norm. We're a big company and as far as the commercial real estate industry goes, we are well known. Even though we're a huge company, we are a close-knit company and very personal with each other; my work place is kind of like a family to me. The CEO even knows my name. That says a lot. At the agency, I would talk to the boss one day and he won't know my name the other next day. Not only do we work hard, we play hard as well. We have happy hours every Friday, do volunteer work and we have annual sales meetings where we make it very interactive and fun. For example, we had a scavenger hunt at our last meeting. Lastly, the pay is good. This job is paid based on commission which works really well for me since I am good with people. I am actually the top sales lead in my department. I had some experience in sales during my college career where I worked in retail at Victoria Secret for two years and Nordstrom for three years. Everything I learned from working in retail helped me build a foundation in sales.

my typical day| My work starts at 7:30AM. I come in and check my email and messages for about half an hour. The rest of the day, I make phone calls. Sometimes, but not all the time, I have people shadow me. I have new people come to me to ask me for advice and shadow me. It's not necessarily training them, but more like being a mentor for new hires. When I do my phone calls, I call about 100 people per working day. It actually ranges depending on the day, but it can be 85-110 calls, if not more. It also depends on the quality of the conversation. Sometimes the receiving end doesn't pick up or the conversation can last about two hours. The people I talk to have to sign up to to use our website and they have to leave their number in order to sign up. What I do is encourage people to pay for a subscription. If they don't buy a subscription, they won't be able to see a lot of their listings of properties.

what they are | The main challenge is doing the same thing every single day. Sometimes it gets tough to get motivated, but you have to find it for yourself in order to be successful. Sometimes I get frustrated with customers. For example, I can be working with a client for five months; they say that they are going to buy a subscription, but they might flake out last minute. It's kind of disappointing when they do that because of all the effort and time you put on them. The customers will blow you off, but you just have to brush it off. Sometimes it can take me as long as nine months to close a deal or it can take me as short as 10 minutes. It just really depends on the customer. Seventy percent of the deals I close with people are done within a week.

all about growth | Sales is not the only department at LoopNet. There are different positions available to different departments of the company. For example, I can move to the Advertising Client Services department. Normally, with my company, they hire people internally. If you are good with sales, stand out from the crowd, and if people know you, you will have first priority. Also, the longer you commit yourself to the company, the better it will do for you.

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