The rise of sales jobs

Actually, you are wrong! Outside of direct sales, personal services, non rail transportation, and perishable goods storage, almost everything could be OFF SHORED!

Take walmart as an example. A LOT of the non perishable goods they provide are from ELSEWHERE!

BTW it has been made effectively ILLEGAL, in the US, to have a full time lower income earner. And full time has been REDEFINED! It WAS 40hours a week. It is now THIRTY hours a week. That means the workers need to be cut back to 29 hours a week. If they make it 30, it triggers a TON of laws, based on "full time" and a new one is OC which gets EXPENSIVE!

This obviously means that companies will get rid of workers, and need more workers, and people will be less happy. Of course, the higher earners make more sense, and there are fewer, so things aren't QUITE as bad there.

So more jobs means NOTHING!!!!!! Frankly, I think they should FORGET about unemployment and replace it with:

TOTAL POPULATION
TOTAL CITIZENS
TOTAL EMPLOYED
TOTAL GETTING GOVERNMENT ASSISTENCE
TOTAL GOVERNMENT ASSISTENCE
AVERAGE GOVERNMENT ASSISTENCE FOR THOSE GETTING IT
AVERAGE HOURS PER WEEK
TOTAL HOURS PER WEEK
AVERAGE YEARLY INCOME
TOTAL YEARLY INCOME

Steve

In addition to what Steve said, most employers hire entry level sales reps just to generate leads. As a business owner, if you train someone in many or all aspects of your business, there's a very good chance that the individual will become your competition at some point.

Non-Compete and Non-Disclosure agreements are not as effective as you might think either. I won a case where I was taken to court after signing a non-Disclosure agreement and from what I understand this is not uncommon. Most judges are reluctant to prohibit an individual from working, especially in an industry where they've been trained. That's why most business owners are reluctant to train them.

If you look up "Bob Ross" in the Offline Marketing section of the forum he has a lot of great input on the subject as well. He only hires entry level people and has "closers" standing by whenever the new guy gets someone on the phone that's interested.

There are some people in certain industries that probably wouldn't have a problem with it, though.

Good luck.

It's interesting reading these comments on sales.

I don't consider myself a salesman but I do make sales, specifically on Craigslist & what I'm selling isn't really what I would consider to be a highly sought after product, it's more of an impulse buy but at the same time it's a product that is helpful & can be marketed in a variety of ways.

Anyways, reading these comments & thinking about telemarketers making cold calls, well, I just don't see where the problem is & why it would take so many contacts to make a sale. I get dozens of leads pretty easy on Craigslist, but I target people in a sub-category so basically those people are pre-sold in a way.

Maybe the telemarketer list just suck, I mean I'm not going to try & sell a tractor to a lawyer.

Probably why I am always looking for people to train to make money... I never understood, people want to to earn... But to earn big requires some level of discipline.
I don't believe in twisting an arm to make money... So "Its a Number game".

Oh, there's absolutely profit for the sales organizations, and you are right that this explains the constant demand for salespeople.

There are certainly good companies which offer ethical opportunities for their customers as well as for their salespeople. There are also plenty of organizations which don't, (and not-so-coincidentally, those have far higher churn). The problem is in differentiating between the two.

Because there is so much unethical behavior out there, you need to be extremely careful when you research these companies before you make a decision to join. The solid companies do exist, and those firms do want to train their sales team to do very well. I wish you the best of success in identifying them!

Employing and training sales people is a numbers game, especially in higher-ticket industries like car sales.

When I was in the car business, I worked for a company that was hired to revamp sales departments at dealerships.

We would go in and install a liner/closer system. Would hire 20-30 'green peas' and train them to land people on a car and get an "I'll buy it today if we can make a deal" commitment. The liner would sit the people in the booth, and the closer would go in.

Our goal was, in 90 days, to sift through the salespeople we were constantly hiring and get 6-8 decent closers, and to train 3-4 desk people - the 'sales managers' - how to get the best performance from the closers.

Most salespeople made little more than minimum wage. The decent liners made 15-20 deals a month and went home with 4x-5x minimum wage. The exceptional ones were turned into closers. The decent closers made $50K - $80K a year, and the really good ones made over $100K.

It's all in training, motivation, and innate personality traits.

I can't remember who said it - Zig Ziglar, maybe Earl Nightingale? - "If you learn how to sell, you'll never go hungry." Or something along those lines.