The Trait That Transfers Anywhere
The one trait that transfers to every industry in sales.
It's not your resume. It's not your network. It's not even your track record. The single most transferable asset a sales professional carries from one industry to the next is curiosity.
Casey McGinn didn't start in medical device sales. He started in accounting, and then accounting services sales. He moved to sports medicine and then spine device sales. Each transition required learning an entirely new technical language, a new buyer profile, and a new set of objections. What carried him through every one of those pivots wasn't domain expertise. It was the genuine desire to learn more than the person across the table expected him to know.
In medical device sales, the technical learning curve is steep. Surgeons are exacting, highly educated buyers who have zero patience for a rep who hasn't done the work. Here's what Casey McGinn of SI Bone found: a rep who can walk into a five-minute window with a surgeon and demonstrate real clinical knowledge doesn't just close cases. They become a resource, and resources get called back in ways that competitors don't.
The same dynamic plays out across industries. In tech sales, in healthcare IT, and in any complex B2B environment, the rep who stays genuinely curious about the client's world operates at a level that product training alone can't manufacture. Curiosity is what makes the learning stick. It's what makes the questions land differently. It's what makes a buyer feel seen rather than processed.
The career transition question in sales is almost always framed around credentials: do I have the right background, the right industry experience, the right contacts? These things matter at the door. They rarely determine what happens once you're inside. What determines that is whether you're willing to learn fast, stay humble about what you don't know yet, and ask the question one more time even when you think you already have the answer.
"If you know how to sell, stay curious, and are eager to learn, you can go into any industry. The fire in the belly is the credential."
The Venn diagram of any two industries has a middle section. That middle section is always the salesperson who was willing to learn what lived on both sides. Curiosity is how you earn your place there. It's the one credential that doesn't expire, doesn't require a degree, and compounds with every conversation you're genuinely present for.
Three things worth thinking about:
How curious are you about your client's world right now?
Not curious enough to fill in the discovery fields but actually curious to learn. Do you know what keeps them up at night, what they're being measured on, what changed in their industry in the last six months? The rep who knows the answers to those questions without being asked has a relationship the competitor can't replicate with a better price.
Are you learning more about your industry than your role requires?
The minimum viable knowledge to close a deal is not the same as the knowledge that makes you the rep a buyer calls first. In highly technical fields like medical device sales or enterprise tech, the reps who go deeper than the training deck build a competitive moat that has nothing to do with price. What are you learning right now that nobody asked you to?
If you were switching industries tomorrow, what would you lead with?
Not your product knowledge, that won't transfer. Not your contact list, most of it won't either. What transfers is your ability to learn fast, ask smart questions, and earn trust in a room where you're the newest person. That skillset is built through curiosity, practiced daily, and not activated at the moment of transition.
Industries change. Products evolve. The buyer who loved your last solution may not need your next one. What stays constant is the rep who shows up genuinely interested in what the person across the table is trying to solve. That rep always has somewhere to go. Curiosity is the career.
That's Road Notes from The Traveling Saleslady. If you relate to this one, the full conversation that inspired it is waiting for you on The Traveling Saleslady podcast on YouTube: @TheTravelingSaleslady. Find it wherever you listen. See you on the road and Journey On.
Road Notes is a production of The Traveling Saleslady in partnership with Brilliant Beam Media.
