SALES
A career in sales is exciting and financially rewarding. If you want to make a difference to a company’s fortunes, sales could be the career for you.
In today’s competitive business atmosphere, a good sales team is crucial to a company’s success. Salespeople are responsible for researching their marketplace, building up a good relationship with their clients and meeting their targets in a fast-moving, dynamic environment.
What’s involved?
Modern salespeople, particularly at management level, act as professional consultants to customers. This involves maintaining sales from existing clients, encouraging new business, and liaising between producers, wholesalers and retailers.
Sales work varies greatly between industries – it may predominantly involve contact with the public or business-to-business work, for example. The work can involve calling on potential customers, visiting wholesalers and retailers, attending trade fairs and giving product advice and demonstrations.
Jobs for graduates
Typical graduate-level jobs are trainee sales executive, account executive and sales manager. Jobs are spread across the country, with a concentration in the larger states like Lagos, Portharcourt and Oyo
The main sectors graduates go into include:
* fast-moving consumer goods such as food and drink
* other retail and household goods
* industrial products
* business services
* media sales.
Sales sectors you can work in
Consumer
Sales career opportunities can be found in most major companies, such as Procter & Gamble and Unilever. In these posts, new recruits start in field sales, selling products to wholesalers and retailers or in a head office, selling directly to large supermarkets and multiples.
Technical
Opportunities in technical sales are typically found in large petrochemical and engineering companies, such as Total. Sales professionals working in this field find the best solutions to their customers’ technical problems and build long-term relationships with them.
As well as general selling ability, sales professionals in these roles are often required to hold relevant engineering or science degrees for detailed technical understanding of products and their customers’ requirements.
Media
Increasingly, media companies are recruiting staff to sell the advertising space and airtime available in their media.
Media sales professionals negotiate the sale of advertising space in the press and posters, and airtime on TV, radio and cinema. They may sell space or time to advertising/media agencies or directly to advertisers. Media sales professionals often work to tight deadlines and can work long hours.
Pharmaceutical
New recruits in pharmaceutical or life sciences will find sales opportunities with drug companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer. Rather than actually selling drugs, pharmaceutical sales professionals advise doctors, hospital specialists and other healthcare professionals about the range of drugs available and technical issues relating to them.
Financial
Financial sales staff may work as independent financial advisors (IFA), as representatives of a particular bank, insurance company or they may be self-employed.
Financial sales involve selling a range of products, including a bank’s products, life insurance, pensions and savings plans. A good understanding of customers’ needs, priorities and lifestyles is required.
JOB ROLES
Sell, sell, sell – that’s the priority in this challenging yet exciting sector and there are various job options for graduates.
* Advertising account handlers
What they do
* work in agencies
* act as a link between agency and client
* co-ordinate jobs
* chase progress of jobs
* facilitate meetings between client and members of the creative team
* monitor effectiveness of advertising campaign.
Key skills
* the ability to work under pressure
* teamworking skills
* the ability to work with a wide range of clients
* motivation
* good organisational skills
* the ability to work on a number of projects at the same time
* excellent communication skills
* the ability to absorb complicated briefs quickly
* budgetary skills
* negotiation skills
* the ability to think creatively.
* Media sales representatives
What they do
* work for employers in the media industries – TV, print publishers and radio companies
* develop new business by finding out who holds the advertising budget in a target organisation and arranging to speak to them
* persuade clients to buy advertising space/time in a particular medium
* explain the benefits of this medium, using statistics on readership or viewing figures as evidence
* offer a price and be prepared to negotiate
* close the deal and record the details
* spend a great deal of time on the phone, where the atmosphere can be compared to a dealing room in a bank.
Key skills
* communication skills
* good telephone manner
* persuasive ability
* confident and outgoing personality
* the ability to create relationship with customers
* diplomacy and patience
* ability to work under pressure and
achieve targets
* numeracy.
* Recruitment consultants
What they do
* work for specialist or general recruitment agencies
* market their services to clients
* obtain the brief for vacancies
* interview candidates
* match prospective candidates to jobs
* place advertisements
* agree terms and conditions with the client.
Key skills
* excellent communication skills
* good marketing skills
* ability to get on with people at all levels
* team-working skills
* computer literacy
* the ability to cope under pressure. |
