Making a career of sales

8th April 2025 |   Bob Apollo

There is no doubt that sales can be an excellent and satisfying career. As a reader of this Journal, I hope that you already believe this as strongly as I do. I am encouraged by the work being done by a growing number of schools, educational establishments and bodies like the UK’s Institute of Sales Professionals (ISP) to establish and promote selling as an attractive and respected profession.

Sales as a career offers the potential for immense upward mobility, diverse career transitions, and opportunities for personal reinvention. And yet this very flexibility means that salespeople who think of what they are doing as merely a current job rather than a long-term professional career will probably never fulfil their potential.

I want to make the case for thinking of sales as a professional career that benefits from conscious planning and intentional decisions about what the next step could and should be without being locked into a linear development path.