Sales emerging as a professional career

Once the corporate refuge of the gregarious, but intellectually challenged, sales is emerging as a highly lucrative and rewarding career for those with the necessary talent and skills.

It is ironic that the function that is central to the success or failure of so many organisations is usually not represented at board level, and seldom recommended as the career of choice by educators, career guidance counsellors or parents. All of this in spite of the fact that there are young salespeople, in their twenties, earning seven figure incomes. Sales is a profession in which prodigious talent can reap prodigious rewards.

American statistics highlight the problem. Today, more college graduates will become salespeople than any other career. However, less than a dozen of the more than 4000 colleges and universities have established formal sales programs. In South Africa, as far as I know, only the University of Johannesburg offers a national diploma in sales – but no degree course.

There is a desperate shortage of capable salespeople and ,in many industries ranging from media and IT, to life assurance, companies wage a destructive war of attrition, poaching successful salespeople from their competitors, lacking the appetite or ability to identify and recruit young, energetic, and talented salespeople who simply lack a track record. It will take a significant effort from our universities to develop sufficient numbers of talented and professionally trained salespeople to meet our current business needs.

The current situation is pretty dire, and many sales forces get by on the herculean efforts of a relatively small percentage of salespeople to deliver the bulk of the company's revenues and profits.

In the absence of any meaningful support from our universities, companies will have to rely largely on their own resources, making use of credible sources of research, training and recruitment.

The August 2006 edition of Harvard Business Review was devoted entirely to sales. Hopefully this heralds an awakening and a realisation that sales must and will professionalise. The days of Willy Lohman and “Glengarry Glen Ross” are fading quickly.