Greetings from foggy San Francisco!

I started my rotation here about five weeks ago, and I love everything the Bay Area has to offer. My current role is in GE Capital’s Corporate Finance division, which provides financing solutions like cash flow lending, asset-based and asset-backed lending, and equipment leases and loans to businesses (you can read more about it here).

I’m working on a team that supports salespeople in the West region. My first two rotations were marketing roles, and that’s my background – I really haven’t had any exposure to sales before, and that’s why I wanted to complete at least one sales rotation during my two years in the ECLP program. I see it as doing my due diligence to map my career at GE. So it’s both good and bad news that I love sales, because it’s going to be a tough choice between sales and marketing.

So what draws me to sales? I like the immediacy of customer feedback, and I like the back-and-forth of listening to customers’ needs and offering solutions that can help them. It’s a totally different model that working in marketing, which is a team-based and cooperative environment driven by leadership. To be in sales is to be an individual contributor, an entrepreneur, and in a sense, a risk-taker.

On the other hand, I like the analytic aspects of marketing – using data to gain surprising insights, identifying pools of customers who will respond to a product’s value proposition, and tailoring messaging for effective communication. I also like the new product process, whereby product development is closely tied to unmet needs in the marketplace.

So why should you care?

Well, if you’re in business school and you’re not quite ready to commit to a particular function or product for the rest of your life, the ECLP program offers a great opportunity to check out different functions and use what you’ve learned to map a career path. For example, in Capital, you can choose from rotations in marketing, sales, capital markets, risk, asset management, and government relations. And GE is the kind of company that will help you find a way to do what you love, so I know that the right role will be out there for me when I graduate from the program.

So that’s my serious post. Check back next week and I’ll tell you about all of the fun things I’ve been doing in the beautiful Bay Area!

Posted by Kate