How the world’s most overlooked discipline is being reshaped by technology but held back by a persistent lack of sufficient capability-building investment. Why it is time we gave it the respect and training interventions it deserves.
A Profession Without a Classroom
A quick check with many African universities reveals degree programs in Marketing, Accounting, Medicine, Law, and Engineering, each with structured curricula, licensing bodies, and clear career paths. You will however struggle to find a degree in Sales, yet sales professionals outnumber accountants, marketers, and doctors combined. Actually, today’s sales people are products of the aforementioned degrees, trained for other professions but end up in sales.
The scale of the gap in terms of employee training is equally shocking. The Middle East and Africa region accounted for just 5.5% of the global sales-training software market in 2024, a $146.8 million slice projected to reach $347.9 million by 2030 (Grand View Research). Meanwhile, Africa’s e-learning market is on track to nearly double, from $4 billion in 2026 to $7.77 billion by 2034, with corporate training now its fastest-growing segment at 30.6% share (IMARC Group). The money for capability-building exists on this continent; just very little of it reaches sales specifically.
Nearly every business on the planet, be it a roadside vendor in Kampala, a fintech start-up in Lagos or a multinational firm in Nairobi, depends on someone closing a deal. Sales generates the top line: revenue, the lifeline of any venture. Simply put, without it, there is no accounting to do and no marketing to fund.
In reality, sales is a lonely profession. Sales are often made alone, far from colleagues, friends, and family, and salespeople are still expected to “handle objections.” Mr Ben Mbuvi, my boss many years ago, always said:
“I know it is very lonely out there, and as a result I do not want anyone to stand in the way of anything that any salesperson needs to execute their job.”
That loyalty is part of why colleagues in other departments have long assumed salespeople are advantaged and favoured.
This is the paradox at the heart of the sales profession across Africa: sales is simultaneously the most essential and the most neglected discipline in the world of work. Two forces are recently converging to expose that neglect: one technological and the other structural.
The first force is the rapid rise of sales technology: CRMs, AI-driven lead scoring, and automated sales-enablement platforms, transforming how top-performing sales organizations operate globally but often leaving under-resourced African sales teams playing catch-up.
The second, and more damaging, is long-standing underinvestment in sales capability-building itself. Marketing teams and accountants, for example, get accessible continuous development, degree courses, and certification courses from bodies like the Chartered Institute of Marketing and ACCA. Even old professions like medicine ensure doctors get mandatory recertification. Sales teams in Africa, the people generating the revenue that keeps organizations alive, are left to learn on the job, through trial, errors, and inherited bad habits.
Interestingly, the biggest multinationals figured this out many years ago. For example, Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (then SABCO), Diageo, Unilever (then Brooke Bond), and AB InBev (then South African Breweries) had built internal sales academies: company-run “universities” for capability-building. I can’t place when or why these seem to have later either scaled down or died, but CCBA is reportedly reversing that drift under Melkamu Abebe, its Ethiopia Managing Director. He is remembered for once saying:
“We train everyone else to do their jobs well. We just expect salespeople to figure it out.”
A Look Back: How We Got Here
For decades, sales was treated as an apprenticeship trade rather than a profession. For starters, your background did not matter (still mostly doesn’t, even today). New hires shadowed senior reps, absorbed a pitch by osmosis, and were eventually sent out into the field and left to “figure out” everything else. The pattern persists today across FMCG distribution, insurance, and banking sales forces alike.
Example: A telecom company launching a new data bundle might invest heavily in a marketing campaign: brand agencies, media buys, influencer partnerships, while the sales agents tasked with actually converting interest into subscriptions receive a single half-day briefing, if they’re lucky.
This wasn’t always the case in the large multinationals. Structured sales training, academies, mentorship tracks, certification ladders: these were once common in multinationals operating in Africa. Unfortunately, as cost-cutting regimes took hold, the budgets for sales enablement were often the first casualties to be killed.
The Present: A Widening Capability Gap
Today, the gap has become even more glaring, and it shows up in three ways.
Volume without depth
Africa’s young, fast-growing population means armies of new sales team entrants every year, yet very few structured onboarding or certification pathways exist to develop them properly.
Technology outpacing skill
Digital tools are arriving faster than the training needed to use them well.
