The Best Profession: Sales

by Steve Chriest

Salespeople: Highest Return

A vendor partner we worked with a few years ago provided us with some revealing research information about the sales profession. Among working professionals, it appears that salespeople, generally, are a well-balanced, stable group.

In their work as purveyors of sales excellence, this vendor maintains a database of over 300,000 sales candidates, 100,000 business decision-makers, and 1500 sales forces. Understanding salespeople, and formulating actuarial tools that predict success in sales, is a core part of their business. Here is some of the interesting information they have discovered:

Among doctors, lawyers, athletes and salespeople, which profession would you guess has the highest average return for their investment in education? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it is salespeople, not doctors, lawyers or athletes, who enjoy the highest average return for their investment in education.

Who has the highest suicide rate among dentists, psychologists, business executives, laborers and salespeople? If you guessed dentists, you would be right. With all the rejection most salespeople endure on a daily basis, you might think salespeople rank high on this list. In reality, salespeople have the lowest rate of suicide among these groups.

When comparing politicians, TV personalities, building maintenance workers and salespeople, it's salespeople who have the lowest rate of early heart or other stress related diseases. Maybe even onerous, unrealistic sales quotas aren't enough to overly stress most salespeople.

Which profession, among surgeons, entrepreneurs, writers and dentists has the highest divorce rate? For some reason that I'll let you speculate about, dentists again top this list. The sales profession is second lowest on the list, and only Catholic Priests have a lower rate of divorce!

This should all be good news for sales managers and senior managers. It should be comforting to know that most salespeople enjoy a high average return for their investment in education, do themselves in much less often that other professionals, are less likely to succumb to stress and other stress related diseases than many other professionals, and stay married longer than many groups of top professionals.

It's no wonder salespeople successfully endure constant rejection from customers, uncomplimentary skits on Saturday Night Live, and the blame for lagging sales, even when their company's product or service offering are at fault. It seems that well-adjusted, optimistic, stable people just naturally gravitate to the business of sales!

Copyright © 2006 Selling Up TM . All Rights Reserved.

About the author: Steve Chriest is the founder of Selling Up TM (www.selling-up.com), a sales consulting firm specializing in sales improvement for organizations of all types and sizes in a variety of industries. He is also the author of Selling Up , The Proven System for Reaching and Selling Senior Executives. You can reach Steve at schriest@selling-up.com.