re: People who work in sales: how do you like it?

Not sales personally here, but I can give you a finance's POV of sales within a company. I work with our salespeople pretty close from a finance pov helping come up with commission plans, payouts/calculations, etc...

We have 2 distinctly different sales groups in our company, but they are paid roughly the same just on wildly different types of plans. Main thing I have to say is understand your compensation plan, because a lot of our salespeople tend not to or dont want to understand it - or a sales plan that they all agreed to ended up being so complicated (this wasnt my plan ) literally almost nobody could figure out how they were getting compensated with commissions.

If you can get a good base salary - do it, you'll thank me later. Literally every sales person in our company, even the best ones, go through hard times where they are not selling much and even have $0 commission months at times. So if you can secure a good base salary, it will be worth it to you as a security blanket. Dont be that guy that lives off all that commission you get and when it dries up for a short period of time and come crying to executives/finance you need an advance. It doesnt go over well, almost ever. Live off that base salary as much as you can and treat the commission as gravy as much as you can. Too many times I've seen salespeople overleverage themselves when they start making some bank, go out and finance a 2nd home, boat, $80k truck, etc...then when things return to normal, or have some hard times, are in a really bad spot.

So if you're finding jobs with little to no base/salary pay, I'd be highly skeptical, because it means the moment things slow down, or you're in a dry spell, it could be really tough on you. Most of our salespeople get between $50k-$80k base salaries with some exceptions. So that's not tough to live on especially for you if you're making $60k-$75k right now. We have salespeople who only make a few thousand, maybe $10k or less a year in commission (and tend not to last long) and some other are rock stars and have made more than our CEO has in a year (this is a medium sized company ~600 employees).