I wasn’t entirely sure where it came from, but I pulled out all the stops and, 30 minutes later, had the guy convinced that I had the capability he was looking for. Maybe it was that my wife and I were almost out of savings and I was desperate. That’s when I learned the second way to overcome being pigeonholed: I sold the guy. I’m looking for someone with at least five years of marketing experience and an MBA. Still, I used my connections to land an interview with a fast-growing public company in Silicon Valley.Īs I sat across from the VP of marketing, he looked down at my resume, shook his head, and said, “I’m sorry that you came all this way, but I’m afraid you don’t meet our requirements. Once again, I found myself categorized, this time as a sales guy.
Since sales leadership jobs were few and far between, I set my sights on marketing. I was out on the street, pounding the pavement during a recession. But after a successful IPO, the company got squashed by Microsoft.
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I made lots of connections and, within two years, ended up running sales at a software startup. Granted, I initially took a salary hit, but with all that technical and management experience under my belt, I was able to become a top salesman practically overnight. Beyond frustrated, I did something you’d never think of to overcome the dilemma: I chucked it all - 10 years of experience - to start at the bottom as a sales engineer. It took forever, but I finally became an engineering manager, only to get trapped in the middle management abyss. It’s a sticky problem that plagued me throughout my career. I soon learned that, even if you do manage to segue to a different field, you just get stuck with a different label. If you’re lousy at your job, you never get promoted.