Dressing to get the promotion to the next level: Will what you wear determine where you go?

As your career progresses, look to your direct supervisors, the company executives, and the top sales reps at your company for ideas on how to dress correctly in a sales environment. If you want to move up in your job, you should always dress for success. Many reps around the country will complain to me and say they feel stuck at their current level of sales (let’s say in small-to-medium business-to-business sales) and they would like to progress to Major Accounts, Enterprise Accounts, or even National Accounts at their current employer. They tell me about their track record of beating quota month in and month out. They tell me how they are the person that their manager leans on when a new sales rep is brought into the team and needs to learn the ropes. Yet, they always get overlooked when it comes time to move up the ladder to a position with more base salary, a higher commission rate, and more responsibility. I have found that in most of these cases, the rep looking to move up the ladder to the next level almost always dresses like someone not ready to make the move up to Major, Enterprise, or National Accounts. Truth is, upper management does not want to send a rep to sell the CEO at a large account when they are not sure if that sales rep will be able to look the part.
While business casual attire has affected the way people dress in an office environment, you should still dress appropriately if you want to be noticed and get ahead. If you are looking to eventually advance your career and make a good living, then dressing as a “business professional” is a must.

To see if my observation had some validity, I conducted my own survey of sales managers, directors and VPs at various Fortune 1000 corporations nationwide. Here are some of my findings:

• 60% of all Sales VPs claimed that they would “never” promote a person beyond front-line management if that person did not wear a suit and tie every day to work (even if the company has a “business casual” dress code
• 75% of small-to-medium business owners felt that they could make their company appear larger and more successful if their employees all dressed in a traditional professional manner
• 33% of all Final Decision Makers at Fortune 1000 companies that were polled, claimed that they would only buy from sales professionals who appeared successful, and dressed the part. One mechanic shop owner surveyed even said “Just because I need to dress in jeans and a t-shirt to do my job, doesn’t mean I expect a salesperson to dress this way when he comes to sell me his product.”

In addition, I decided to send my sales and marketing team out on sales calls for three months in our new company logo emblazoned golf shirts and khaki slacks. We tracked our numbers of appointments, how many gatekeepers we got past, how many Final Decision Makers we got to actually sit down with, how many sales we made, and what the average dollars per sale were.
Then, after gathering all the data, I sent out my same salespeople to clients for the following three months wearing traditional suits and ties.
Our findings were that the same salespeople selling the same product to all areas of the United States actually saw an increase in sales of over 22% when dressed in full professional attire such as suits and ties.

The bottom line: While the comfort of wearing khaki slacks and a golf shirt to work might seem like a nice perk at a sales job, the fact that you’ll probably make less sales- and therefore less money- isn’t worth the comfort. In the long run, dressing for the part you want, not the job you currently have, is the better way to get noticed, and eventually move up the ladder to a better paying position.