Acting to Sales to Leadership: Glynnis Purcell’s Adventures on Two Continents

What got Glynnis Purcell into the sales industry was Australia. What brought her to Australia was a junior year abroad. During that year, she fell in love with the country. Her plan was to move back and go into film acting, the craft she’d studied in high school and college. “I knew I could do a one-year working holiday visa [in Australia], and I was like, okay, well, worst case scenario, if I can’t break into the acting business in Australia, I’ll be 22 when I move back, and I’ll be young enough to go back and move to LA and be an actress.”

The casting agency she signed with was upfront about the fact that getting work as an American actor in Australia would be difficult, because of the accent. She looked for alternatives and landed on a job common to backpackers and other young visitors to the country. She was contracted out by marketing companies to do street fundraising for charities and other organizations. “I’ll call it my first quote-unquote sales role.”

There are people who might look down upon street fundraising, but Glynnis says, “I was doing face-to-face sales. So, I worked for companies like the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Cancer Council, Cerebral Palsy Alliance, Fred Hollows Foundation, which is a New Zealand-based organization because I lived there for a year.” The setup provides a good deal for charities, too. The way Glynnis explains it, a TV ad spot might cost a charity a million dollars and yield a limited number of one-time donations, whereas third-party marketing companies, like the ones she worked for, would guarantee a quota of 15 two-year-commitment signups a week per employee.

SALES PROFESSIONAL → SALES PROFESSIONAL + MANAGER

A few weeks into the job, Glynnis was managing a team of other fundraisers. “It was a pretty hard grind. I would be going to backpackers after work and taking a case of beer and being like, ‘Hey, who wants a job?’ And then recruiting them, bringing them in, taking them out for an interview, and one of our requirements was you had to show them a sale in the interview process, so they would believe it was possible.” Then, in order for Glynnis to maintain her new position, those hires would need to meet their own quotas. She remembers a time when she was managing 12 fundraisers while still acting as a fundraiser with her own quota. “So, I would be sending 12 people out to, let’s say, six different territories…[have to] go to each territory, but still submit a quota of 15 sales a week.”

The upside was simple, though: “‘If you build a team, we will sponsor you to stay in Australia.’ And so I called my casting agency. I was like, ‘Take me off your roster. I got a job that’s going to sponsor me,’ and I never looked back.”

SALES AND MANAGEMENT: HOW TO EXCEL AND WHEN TO AVOID

Leadership was where Glynnis flourished the most. “I’ve always really enjoyed training and coaching people.” This is the role within which she has continued, today as a principal in global specialized sales enablement at Workday, the software development company. In this position, she’s been able to pass along many of the lessons she’s learned as both a sales professional and a manager. Among them, in no particular order:

1. Sales is a numbers game. When fundraising in Australia, the rule was “ten pitches equal one sale.”
   
2. “The sales world is very, very up and down, and so you’re going to have to be okay with not hitting your quota one quarter or having a bad day or getting yelled at on the phone or not hearing back from your prospect or being ghosted…really savor the wins. But be okay when things don’t go your way…”
   
3. “We work in teams because we don’t ever have all the answers. Trying to do it by yourself is going to guarantee that, when you have a bad day, it’s a terrible day, and when you have a good day, there are not a lot of people around to celebrate it with you. So, make sure that you’re bringing solutions to the table and that you’re using the resources around you to talk through those solutions or listen to ideas.”
   
4. Know how to put your sales experience to good use. “When I was looking for a new job, I was a director of sales. I was looking for VP roles, and enablement was traditionally run by people in L & D, people who have learning backgrounds or teaching backgrounds.” Glynnis had a different professional upbringing but wound up excelling in enablement. “It’s been so fulfilling. Essentially, I get to do everything you get to do as a leader. But I don’t carry a bag, right? I coach people. I develop them. I get to work with incredible people who have all these ideas of, ‘How do we solve all these big problems?’ All the things that salespeople deal with on a regular basis.”
   
5. Know what motivates you. “Because if it’s not selling, or that starts to wane, and all you think is that the next thing is management, but you don’t like managing people”—well, the story may not end the way you want it to.
   
6. “It’s okay to have a really amazing career as a salesperson forever.”
   
7. It’s also okay to not be a sales professional forever. And it’s okay to never be a manager. “Sales will set you up to be really successful because it teaches you such great foundational skills. But if you’re sitting there and you’re like, ‘I don’t know if I want to be in sales forever,’ or ‘I don’t really know if I want to be a manager, but I don’t know where that takes my career,’ explore. Network. Talk to people. Get out there. Ask your friends, ask your family if they can connect you with people, and see what else there is because I think there are so many people who started in sales, who have gone into other roles, who are so amazing at them.”
   
8. “Find ways to practice being social.”
   
9. “Don’t make your life about work as a salesperson. The biggest downfall I see with salespeople is, they’re like, ‘I can never take vacation’… and it’s the most damaging thing, I think, because if you’re going to work that hard and put that much effort in, go and live your life. And also, nobody wants to talk to you if all you’re going to talk about is your job.”
   
10. “Always seek feedback and be open when it’s given to you.”
    
11. Maybe take an improv course? “Personally, if I could, I would make every salesperson go to an acting class, more specifically an improv class, because the ability to enhance a conversation instead of negating a conversation is something that I think improv specifically really supports.” Being able to move along in the direction of a prospect’s inclinations—even their objections—is a valuable skill.

Although Glynnis left behind her formal acting career, she says she does see overlaps between acting and leadership. “I think the ability to focus and have rigor in a certain field, I think the adaptability that acting gives you, is similar to something you have to have in sales. You have to recover quickly.”

Glynnis is currently a Principal of Global Specialized Sales Enablement at Workday, an AI-driven finance and HR platform. You can learn more about Glynnis here. Be sure to congratulate her while you’re there!