Xerox - Finding A First Job

So you have graduated...now what.

I graduated from the University of Dayton in may of 2005 and had been applying for all sorts of sales jobs. I had applied to every type of company from American Income Life Insurance to a start up company that sold mobile bar-coding layouts for huge factories. I must have had applied for 30 jobs and had been through at least as many interviews. My search ended with my realization that I was going to be selling copiers for the first part of my life.

I had been contacting a number of businesses in the Dayton, OH area and had narrowed my search to a few well known companies: NCR, IBM, Xerox, Procter and Gamble, MeadWestvaco etc... I had high aspirations and was willing to do just about anything to not end up like some of my friends working for Localsmallcompany Inc. I wanted to be branded and have a pedigree so that when I left my first job, my second employer would say, "I want you to meet Kevin, our newest employee. He worked at ________ ."

When I was an intern at Reynolds and Reynolds in college I noticed that people always said that, "Kathy is our number one sales rep this year. She came from IBM." They mentioned that as if it was no surprise that she was successful here. I wanted that. Kathy was riding the coat tails of a company that she no longer worked for. She always humbly pushed off the compliment, which only made people talk about it more.

Well, IBM never returned my call even though I had the help of my sales professor, who worked for IBM for 15 years, passing out my resume to his old IBM-ers. In fact, of all of those companies mentioned only about half had contacted me at all. Xerox, however did. I must have sent Leah, Xerox's Dayton sales manager, three resumes and half a dozen e-mails from January to May and finally she returned my repeated request for a job. Lucky for both of us she was jsut in time. Another local copier company that sold Konica Minolta had been calling me and I was in the interview process with them as well. In fact they had an offer on the table before I had even heard from Leah. This was a huge advantage: I had ammo. Unlike most college graduates I already had leverage, and with a competitor!

I met Leah and toward the end of the interview when she asked me who else I had been talking to I made sure to mention Konica Minolta. She asked a few other questions about them and the rest is history. I started with Xerox and began a journey that I could only have imagined.

I thought I knew a lot about sales.

I was about to find out that I did not.