Career advice loves a five-year plan: pick a lane, climb the ladder, don’t look sideways. Summer Orellano’s story, shared on the latest episode of Sapient Insights Group’s podcast The Pivot Effect, makes a pretty compelling case for the opposite. Summer now leads sales at Sapient. A few years ago, she was managing Airbnbs in Florida, having moved there with her two kids during a hard postpartum stretch. Before that, she took a shot at Nursing school. Because that’s what everyone around her was doing. None of it was mapped out, and that, she says, is kind of the point.
A friendship that started with a rental
Summer’s path to Sapient started sideways, through co-host Susan Richards, who rented one of the Airbnbs Summer managed. The two stayed close, with Susan calling on Summer for odd jobs, dog sitting, housekeeping, “Somebody to put order in my life.” No job offer, just two people showing up for each other.
One moment stuck: Summer almost canceled on cleaning Susan’s house after a rough day, but went anyway. Susan opened the door and just said, “Wine or vodka?” “I showed up,” Summer says. “I could have texted her and said I’m busy, and she would have understood. But I showed up when I was supposed to.” When Sapient later needed help, Susan knew exactly who to call.
Office administrator to sales leader
Summer joined Sapient as a part-time office administrator, a role that outgrew its hours in two weeks and eventually became operations manager. Then, seven months pregnant with her third child, she was asked to step into sales. She’d never held that title, but Susan and Teri Zipper had already watched her sell, working a room at her first HR Tech conference before she ever carried the label.
As Teri notes, people often can’t see their own transferable skills until someone else names them. Problem-solving, resilience, staying personable under pressure none of that shows up on a job description, but it carries across almost any role.
What actually makes her good at it
What carried over into sales, Summer points to being herself: “Being human in sales is really where sales are soaring. When you bring authenticity and who you truly are, you’re selling them on you.” She also credits taking feedback without falling apart: “This is what you gave me, this is what I was expecting, here’s how we resolve it that’s how criticism should be given.”
Her advice for anyone at the edge of a pivot
“Jump. Do it happy, do it sad, do it mad, do it crying, do it excited jump. Because if you don’t, you don’t know. I’d rather make a mistake than not take the chance.” Her one caveat: leave well. “As long as you’re respectable to the people you jumped from, you can always go back.”
The takeaway for leaders
Susan and Teri didn’t find Summer through a job posting; they noticed how she showed up, over time, in roles that had nothing to do with the one she’d eventually fill. As Susan puts it: “We didn’t have a job description for the work we needed done, and that didn’t limit us to looking for somebody who’d been doing it for ten years.” Some of the best hires aren’t found. They’re already in the room.
Catch the full episode of The Pivot Effect Live Now
Listen now: https://lnkd.in/eauyaeKt
Watch Here: https://lnkd.in/ek9dkrWUBOOK
Summer Orellano leads sales at Sapient Insights Group. Find her on LinkedIn and Facebook.
BOOK TIME WITH SUMMER: https://lnkd.in/eGXszyE9
