Understanding Sales and its many misconceptions perhaps? What companies should care about from an early stage of its making

Sales?—?a word often misunderstood and underrated by most. And when it comes to nerds, they often have no respect for anything and anyone related to sales! It is so underrated at times, that companies be it small or large simply fail, as they miss out on the scale the term ‘sales’ can be measured.

This piece is inspired by the book Zero to One by Peter Thiel. And while reading the chapter ‘if you build it, will they come?’ from his book, I couldn’t think but to share some of my personal experiences and thoughts on this.

I’ve had quite a diverse professional career so far. From the leading bengali newspaper to an NGO that teaches leadership, to a WiMAX multinational to a local Ad Tech startup, and now at the largest telecom company in the country, I had the privilege to experience a variety of roles and learn to understand and appreciate the differences. It also taught me from inside the organizations and meeting the stakeholders on the outside, that people tend to put almost everything into a perspective instead of going deeper into what things really are.The annual advertising spend in Bangladesh is around USD 320 million. And there’s no data in my short research on how many people are directly and indirectly involved in selling this USD 320 million worth of ads. However, from my little experience of the advertising industry, even if I make a random, overestimated guess of 15,000 people in advertising sales, then each person will be selling on average USD 21,000 a year, or BDT 1,680,000 annually. So, given that the average per capita income (nominal) in Bangladesh is around USD 1,100, this makes every person in advertising sales almost 16 times more than their worth. This is quite a good number from a business perspective considering the majority of these sales are manual and direct sales.