#2: Dominating in Male Dominated Industries

I could talk your ear off all day about feeling like women aren’t taken seriously in professional positions, I could list all of the reasons that I feel like as a woman my opportunities are limited in the corporate world, I could tell you why I resent the world I live in for giving me a ladder with broken rungs while I watch my male counterparts ascend on escalators… But here’s the reality- I am not limited by my gender (even in such a cutthroat environment like the sales industry) and I’ll gladly tell you why.

My parents were never really together. I mean, they were, they did the whole dating to marriage thing and they had a house and me, but I don’t have a single memory of the two of them sharing a happy moment. (This has a point, I promise). I know happy moments happened- I have pictures of them during their wedding (dad, laughing, working the crowd, and mom, beaming her million dollar smile, working her looks), and some pictures from their honeymoon… but I’m fully serious when I say the happiest I remember them being when they were in the same room was the day my mom got a condo across the neighborhood when I was two, maybe three.

Because of their complete inability peacefully coparent- forget the idea of either of them fully honoring the role the other parent played- they each independently channeled both motherhood and fatherhood within themselves when I was in either of their custody. “Custody”… Love that word. Sounds like jail.

As far back as my memory serves me, I witnessed my father’s hard work, but also his soft, compassionate, empathetic, creative, and personable side. Some may call it “feminine”- as a child I called it “dad”. My mother, on the other hand, was feminine and soft in her looks, but driven and cutthroat in her work ethic. “Masculine”, maybe, but that was just who mom was to me. Nothing manly about it in my young mind, just adulthood. Just drive and motivation.

My fathers sisters were also incredibly hardworking in their respective avenues. I remember very clearly how my father would characterize them, and I’d see it too. As a kid I’d see that they were very smart, motivated, well spoken, and- to put it bluntly- didn’t take anyone’s shit. Bad freakin’ ass. They’re still the same way and I look up to both of them.

Having seen, from such a young age, men opening their hearts, being gentle and kind, and balancing both masculine and feminine traits- and adversely- seeing women unapologetically and unquestioningly climb corporate ladders, pave their own paths, overcome, and break down walls, I genuinely didn’t learn to identify intrinsic male and female characteristics during my most formative years like so many do. “Girls like pink, boys like blue”… Puh-lease, let my five-year-old self play with my Hot Wheels track while wearing purple sparkly kids eyeshadow in peace. Don’t question my hail mary on grandpa’s football field in Land Park while I sport my pink, knee high Twinkle Toes Converse. Sure, I witnessed and learned gendered expectations later into my childhood, but at that point I already had my preconceived ideas of what it meant to be a contributing person in our society, and gender had nothing to do with it.

I know that’s why I thrive in diverse settings- including those wherein few people look like me. My girl-ness doesn’t cross my mind when I insert myself into new spaces, because why would it? It has nothing to do with my competence.

And that’s the thing- in business (and life), if you believe something with your whole heart, soul, and being, you can convince anyone of the same thing. This applies to sales and beyond. It makes me a highly effective salesperson and negotiator, yes, but it also ensures that my presence in “unconventional” settings for a woman is unquestioned by those around me. My belief that I belong in corporate, male-dominated spaces isn’t just a belief—it’s an unwavering fact. Because I don’t doubt my place, others rarely do either. I am qualified, determined, and needed in every room I enter, and that certainty shows in the way I carry myself. It’s landed me interesting, stimulating jobs and has been the catalyst for many high-yielding business relationships.

While confidence has been crucial for me, I recognize it’s not a cure-all for the systemic challenges that persist in the workplace. There are obstacles—harassment and assault—that no amount of self-assurance can erase. I’ve faced these too, like so many other women, and I won’t pretend that simply ‘knowing I’m hot shit’ makes them go away. BUT-

I do know that by staying focused, refusing to doubt my place as a deserving woman, and working my living ass off, I can always push through barriers and find success- thus dominating in male dominated industries.

#1: I Look Forward to Failing.

Let’s play two truths and a lie: 

1. We’re two days into the new year and I haven’t made a single sale. 

2. I blew my only easy New Year’s Day goal. 

3. Number one and two freaking suck.

I’m sure if you have basic reasoning skills and a grasp on the English language, you have deduced that number three is the lie based on the title of this blog post. You would be correct. Allow me to break down my two truths.

  1. It’s January second. The dealership I work at is in its third week here in our kick-ass new location, and although I was the first salesperson here to close (woohoo!) and have since sold even more, I haven’t closed in 2025. You bet your ass I’m doing everything and a half to make sure I do, but things aren’t as busy as I would’ve expected them to be with Christmas money in the pockets of buyers.
  2. My only goal for January first was to write this blog post. I did not. I spent seventy dollars on this damn website domain to get rid of the “slash WordPress dot com” and I blew the one and only goal I had set for myself. I was too busy battling a hellish hangover and trying to erase the memories of the night before. Happy 2025 to me.

Sounds pathetic, doesn’t it? Maybe. But sounds can be deceiving (I know that’s not the saying. Bear with me.)

If you happen to be the version of Roxanne that I was prior to sales, you’d be bummed as hell by my two truths. But if you’re the Roxanne from now- two sales jobs deep and now fully engaged in the culture of B2C (business to customer) sales, you’d be eager to capitalize on the first two failures of 2025. 

Cap·i·tal·ize , /ˈkapədlˌīz/, verb.

To take the chance to gain advantage from.

“do they have what it takes to capitalize on this emerging opportunity?”

Hell yes I do, and here’s how I got to that point.

My first sales position was a remote, hot lead, inbound call position. Sounds easy. The only thing that was easy was selling myself- and yes, that’s about eighty percent of the job- but that eighty percent was only easy because I happen to be a people person to my core, but man, I had no idea how far that other twenty percent could stretch. That twenty percent included discrepancies between what people were looking for and what our product offered, timing, location, capital, family, and most importantly- my ability (or inability) to overcome said obstacles. With all of that being said, I still did quite well as a first time salesperson. I was on a high with my first successful week of sales in the bag. I rode that high as long as I could, but it came crashing down when I saw “continued training meeting” on my schedule for the next week. 

“What in the hell is a continued training meeting? Why am I scheduled for one?”

I thought I was doing well. I was doing well! That’s what made it so much more anxiety-inducing; did my superiors not have faith in me? What kind of a tremendous fuck-up did I make to discredit my good numbers in spite of being a rookie?

And these were all questions I shamelessly asked during my dreaded CTM. Untactful? Maybe. Enlightening to unpack? Very.

It was then that I learned that training and skill development is never something a good salesperson outgrows. My supervisor told me that the moment a salesperson becomes comfortable is the moment they plateau- and I came to discover very quickly that a plateau in sales might as well be a nose dive.

I learned so much in that first CTM. I realized that despite my KPIs (key performance indicators- which, in this case, were my capture and close rates), I still had many areas that needed major improvement. More importantly, I learned that even the biggest failures- a lost sale, the occasional irritated customer, and many other road bumps, were moments to immediately jot down to discuss in my next CTM. I came to learn that the more CTMs I was scheduled for, the more time and energy management was willing to invest in me. They had faith in my potential. My supervisor listened to my bullet -pointed failures, and I listened even more eagerly to her advice on overcoming future similar obstacles. CTMs became something to look forward to, and that anticipation morphed into a ravenous hunger to improve, to leave behind techniques that weren’t serving me, and even to have light shed on flaws that I had no awareness of that my supervisor had overheard in my calls.

The transition to automotive sales was a culture shock, and looking back, I should’ve gone into it with the exact same mindset as my remote sales. I had lots of experience conducting business face to face, and I felt highly confident in my sales skills, but the intersection of those two qualities had all red lights. Can you guess what taught me the most and helped those red lights green-ify, streamlining the intersection?

When I dropped the ball on a sale, I’d separately ask both of my managers and the top salesman “how did I fuck up this time?” Although crass, it was the key to beginning to dismantle my unaddressed road blocks and poor mindset. We can unpack all of the logistical skills I learned in my first few weeks another time, but the biggest overall lesson I learned time and time again- and continue to learn every day- is that failure is never the enemy. Failure is the only sure-fire way to learn something new every damn time.

So why am I not upset about not making a sale today and not writing my blog post yesterday? I learned. I learned that I can’t solely rely on our in-house lead generation and I’ve since kick started a number of self-generating lead methods, and I learned that if I plan on having even a shadow of a productive day, I can’t have a hangover.

Every day that I come into the dealership, I motivate myself to eat my fuck-ups and wait for a lesson to come out the other end. I encourage you to do the same… And don’t water them down. Don’t sugar coat them, don’t supplement the word “failure” with “learning experience”. Embrace the failure for what it is and allow it to radically uproot the pieces of you that need uprooting. Thank fate for the areas in which you are lacking, and thank fate even more for the opportunity to fail because of those areas that are lacking so that you can initiate the change that you as a businessperson- a human being- deserve. So, here’s to embracing the failures, the lessons, and the constant journey of growth—because if you’re not failing, you’re not learning.