With growing retail business offering large numbers of job openings, a long term career in sales and marketing is becoming preferred goal of the gen-next, says an industry chamber.

A recent study by the ASSOCHAM says that vacancies in sales and financial services together constituted 28 per cent of the total number of job openings listed on different job portals and newspapers during the last couple of months. The figure overtakes even the number of job openings in Information Technology sector during the same period.

“There are so many opportunities in sales. The expected growth in sales jobs is likely to be 18-20 per cent in the coming days. Since every sector is expanding, more and more marketing professionals will be required.

One cannot expand without having human resources in terms of sales professionals,” Koteshwar Prasad Dobhal, spokesperson of ASSOCHAM says.

Newer trends

New service trend and cut-throat competition have created a group of consumers who are well aware about products or services, thus opening more requirements for trained professionals.

“In fact the IT has broadened the prospect for the professionals. Awareness of the consumers becomes a challenge for service providers which simultaneously creates requirement of salespersons. People, especially in India may go to internet to buy some grocery or other small items but for any high value purchase they still prefer to go to the outlets looking for personal touch,” opines Vijay Kohli, Senior Vice President and Head of Enterprise Business Unit, Nis Sparta which provides soft-skill trainings and process training to the professionals of different service sectors.

“Most companies come up with similar product so, every service provider wants manpower to play the role of differentiators. That’s why the salespersons need to have better convincing skill who can differentiate one product from another,” Kohli adds.

All the world’s a market and men and women are merely salespersons, agrees Sanjay Shivmnani, CEO & President of Career Launcher which provides coaching for management aspirants.

Counting rapid growth in sectors such as insurance, banking, retail, telecom as reasons, Shivmnani says: “Choosing sales as long term career is the most common phenomenon. On an average 60 to 70 per cent of the entire audience pursue finance and marketing studies in management courses.”

“Opportunities in sales have increased very rapidly during the last five years and even more rapidly during the last two years,” Shivmnani says adding “The way of functioning has changed though. Now, it’s not like traditional way of sales persons going door to door. Even the Business Process Outsourcing agents are technically sales persons.

They have to sell some service or product by calling up people on behalf of some company.” Management degree may be a must for some, though majority of the companies recruit professionals having practical experience with basic salespersons like quality (SLQ), opines Kumar Avnish, of Timesjobs.com.

Growth opportunity

“Of course there are tremendous growth opportunity in sales. Around 100-150 new companies are coming every month looking for sales professionals and more than 20 per cent of the total fresh graduates especially from the second tier management colleges choose career in sales and marketing,” says Avnish.

Performance based incentive is the real charm of marketing profession, says Career Consultant Rupa Singh who disagrees that the hue and cry against retail chains and regulations against telemarketing have restricted the youth to come into this profession.

“Sales is a very lucrative profession. Success depends upon one’s own ability to communicate his/her idea. Results come instantly on the basis of one’s own strength, enthusiasm, perseverance and determination,” says Rupa.

The passion for difficulties or obstructions and urge to achieve is yet to ebb the professionals to trespass the boundary of internet stepping beyond door-to-door visit by salespersons, she adds, stressing the idea.

Source: PTI