When I started as an Account Executive I promised myself I would stay in this position for 3 years and I meant it. I believe such a period is needed at least to learn, understand and master a job. However, life has a way of scrambling your plans. I quit after only one year.
Not only did I quit being an AE, but I left my employer after 6 years. This decision was a tough nut to crack for me, it weighed me down for several months. During this time my girlfriend and best friends noticed and were worried about my mood and temper.
When I finally stepped up and communicated my decision an unexpected, positive liberation burst through me. This gave me the reassurance that I had taken the right step.Six years in corporate software sales was an unparalleled start to my professional career, a great experience with lots of opportunities to develop. I got to interact with an abundance of companies from different sizes and industries. Seeing how they operate, where they struggle, and how software can support or distort processes.
Even better, I got to see how these companies make decisions and especially try to influence this decision process. While all of this was interesting, I was still in a bubble, thinking that companies worry daily about optimizing and trying to convince them we had the best answer. When I got to connect with myself, I knew that this bubble was not everything I wanted to see from a professional point of view.
I never intended to become a software expert and I also never wanted to climb the corporate ladder in a global corporation.
Especially not in a corporation that was struggling for quite a while. Nobody likes change and my former employer is still readjusting toward its new strategy. This adjustment felt like moving an oil tanker — difficult and slow. Additionally, in sales, you are confronted with ever-growing quotas and new incentive programs focused on a strategy that most of our customers were not ready for.
Usually, in school, you are taught you need to finish your homework first. However, most of my customers were still trying, struggling, and sometimes failing to implement software they licensed years ago. I am not even mentioning calculating a return on these investments. Instead of fixing issues and supporting customers on their journey, the answer you usually received internally was to suggest to the customer an additional new and costly product.
I also lost trust in what I was doing and felt sleazy. One time I was forced by management to tell a customer I can only discount a range of products if he buys additional licenses. The customer was neither ready for nor currently needed these additional licenses and in the end, it shut down the entire sale. On top, I was fighting internally for my contractually earned incentive payment. Only threatening legal action settled this issue, to this day I cannot comprehend why a company would try such a thing.
I needed something else, something new and especially, something different.All of these issues led to me losing purpose and fun in what I was doing. I needed a change and as life usually makes plans for you, new opportunities knocked on my door. Through my network, I came in contact with one Austrian scale-up and one Austrian start-up. Both were facing exciting challenges, the scale-up needed to grow and the start-up was about to be founded. After several meetings and interviews, I decided to tackle a completely new challenge by joining a digital education start-up and trying to build it up from scratch.
I spent several months on this journey. It was a challenge, but it was fun and provided a steep learning curve for me. I am pretty happy I took the plunge and left the safety net of a high salary and great perks for an opportunity that usually does not come around too often. I can only encourage everyone to sometimes take a leap and try something new!
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