International Sales Career

If you’re looking for an exciting job overseas, consider an international sales career. A career in international sales involves penetrating a new market and helping your company expand their business to other parts of the world or to a specific foreign market. When you have an international sales career, you get the rare opportunity to travel the world, share your sales knowledge to other people, and get paid for it!

Skills Required for an International Sales Career

Before anything else, you have to be adventurous. You need to be willing to leave your comfort zone and the familiarity of your hometown or city in order to venture forth into places you’ve never been to. Aside from being adventurous, the skill sets needed for an international sales career are the same as local sales career. Since the position you will occupy is relatively high up in the ladder, you may need to have a bachelor’s degree in any field, as well as hefty experience in sales - at least five years as a senior sales representative, and at least three years of experience as a sales team manager. You also have to have proven leadership abilities like coaching or mentoring, creative approaches to problem-solving, strong organizational skills, adaptable with changing initiatives and directions, and the ability to fully understand the business’s technical aspect. Finally, you have to be goal-oriented, innovative, and able to work well with colleagues of all management levels.

Finding a Job

Now that you’ve assessed your skills and experience, it’s time to take the important first step towards an international sales career – finding a job. There are several ways you can go about hunting for an international sales job: through your company, through your network, through a sales recruiter, or through your own searching.

The best place to start looking is the very company you work for. If your company is big enough to have its own an international sales department, ask about the requirements needed to be transferred abroad and check with your higher-ups to see if you are qualified to be part of the international sales team.

If your company does not have a sales team, you can start finding a job through the help of your network. By now, you should already have a fairly large network of seasoned sales professionals. Ask your network if they know about any openings in international sales from companies in your industry.

If your network fails to yield any results, you can ask for the assistance of a sales recruiter. A sales recruiter is in charge of finding prospective employees that might be a perfect fit for a job opening. With the help of a sales recruiter, getting your international sales career started will happen a lot faster because the sales recruiter will do all the searching for you.

Finally, you can search for job openings yourself over the Internet or through the papers.

Update Your Resume and Prepare a Cover Letter

Regardless of how you choose to find your international sales job, you have to start preparing the necessary paperwork as early as now. Don’t forget to update your resume and start drafting a cover letter. That way, you can grab job opportunities as soon as you see them and won’t make the mistake of sending an outdated resume.