Would anyone consider it a waste to have the CFA+MBA and good research / modeling / quantitative ability and be in a pure sales job? This is a very subjective, but a job in equity/FI sales seems like the dream - you really don’t do that much hard-core “work” and can still get paid big bucks if you’re good at selling yourself and your product(s). However, if you have the above skills, would you feel like you were “wasting” them if you didn’t actually apply them and just used them as rubber stamps to gain credibilty when selling/pitching? Just curious as to what others think…
top sales people do have the above listed skill set. I think the day of the Essex wide boy sales trader is over so knowledge/intellect is very important. Brokers are more likely what you are thinking of but they are gradually improving…
I didn’t mean to imply that top sales people don’t have the skills - more than likely they developed/gained them when they were younger before transitioning to the sales side of things. But if you look at most banks, the originators don’t really do that much analysis…and most “analysis” they do is very high level and relatively “hands off”. I guess what I’m getting at is that you could spend years building your ability to think in a rigourous analytical manner and then after all that effort you might be only using 20% of your “analytical” skill-set in a sales role. It just seems like a waste in a way…but then again, the whole point of gaining those skills is to work your way into a position that you want - be it sales or research or any other area.
I didn’t mean to imply that top sales people don’t have the skills - more than likely they developed/gained them when they were younger before transitioning to the sales side of things. But if you look at most banks, the originators don’t really do that much analysis…and most “analysis” they do is very high level and relatively “hands off”. I guess what I’m getting at is that you could spend years building your ability to think in a rigourous analytical manner and then after all that effort you might be only using 20% of your “analytical” skill-set in a sales role. It just seems like a waste in a way…but then again, the whole point of gaining those skills is to work your way into a position that you want - be it sales or research or any other area.
Christ no. you’ll find it boring, you’re either square, low or high. You’re very dependant on market movements, sector you cover, people above you etc. Use your intellect, you wont work as hard as you think you would, you’ll get paid more and you find it stimulating.
I think the most common thread among the salespeople at my bank is that they really like managing relationships with buy-siders. That involves a lot of handholding, a lot of calls to clients just to check up on things, traveling all around NYC going from meeting to meeting, and of course, liaising with the analysts and their teams. It’s true that being in sales doesn’t require that much analytical horsepower (hopefully the salespeople at my firm aren’t reading this, but if they are I still stand by my statement)…but it does require someone who has the endurance, desire, and interpersonal skills to want to spend that much time managing relationships. Basically, building a career in sales is challenging for different reasons. To answer the orignial poster’s question, as for the number of sales folks that have CFA, I’d say that there are a few but not too many. I wouldn’t think of any of the salespeople I know as being all that quantitatively savvy, either.