How can I work for myself?

October 7, 2008 8:16 AM

Help me build my sales empire!

So I've been in sales for the majority of my working life. I've been mostly involved in selling to customers via the telephone, calling on "C-level" individuals and selling software etc. I've had about every good job in town, and currently work in the telesales department of a software company where I've made between $100-134K per year since 2004.

I have come to the realization that I would like to work for myself somehow. I would really like to get my own small office space, or even work from home and sell my "own" products. I figure that I'm currently selling millions of dollars of someone else's product a month, and if I could somehow find a service or product that I own or offer I could make a nice business for myself. I just have no idea what it would be.

I know the economy is in shitter right now, and I should probably just be glad that I'm making good money. But I'm reaching out to you guys for suggestions on what types of products or services I could sell for myself and make bigger bucks.

I don't want to sell insurance, or become a real estate agent / mortgage broker etc. I want to find some niche where I can become my own reseller or agent and take my sales skills to the next level with my own operation. Can anyone recommend any suggestions to me?

posted by Hellafiles to Work & Money (2 answers total)

Best answer: What you're looking for is the Micro-ISV community. ISV = Independent Software Vendor. There's a lot of guys out there who have cool software products but have no one promoting them or selling them to the bigger customers. SoftwareByRob is one of the poster children for the Micro-ISV movement.

Generally these guys come in two flavors -- either they want to build a product and don't care about maintaining it (in which case you buy it from them lock, stock, and barrel and put your own management in place to further and support the prodcut), or have the product and support / expansion plans in place but don't know how to market it.

I'm heading this way myself with my first products coming out after christmas... after about five years of consulting and gaining experience in various businesses. I'll be looking for a sales partner when I hit that point.
posted by SpecialK at 8:47 AM on October 7, 2008 [2 favorites]

Would your current employer consider letting you becoming an independent sales agent for them? Calculate what the commission rate would have to be to keep you close to whole if you had no base salary and put together a proposal to be an independent sales agent for the company. Then you can also sell other, possibly complementary software and services to the same customers and leverage the same general level of effort into a higher income.
posted by COD at 11:35 AM on October 7, 2008