Reverse Painful Profession Pay Drop

So 352 types of jobs get the official survey treatment. Ranked by annual salary, I’ve listed these sales-related 14 below.

For a yardstick, the average UK annual wage is around 30k. The greyer text potentially feature more in non-sales.

Rank	Role	Occupants	% change	Salary £
2	Brokers	13,000	-13.7	116,104
4	Marketing and sales directors	144,000	-1.4	82,360
25	Sales accounts and business development managers	416,000	-4.5	49,292
41	Finance and investment analysts and advisers	91,000	-5.1	43,206
91	Business sales executives	176,000	+0.9	33,769
227	Vehicle and parts salespersons and advisers	8,000	-3.3	22,045
241	Roundspersons and van salespersons	5,000	+1.4	21,252
264	Sales administrators	59,000	+0.4	19,516
267	Sales related occupations	n/a	+8.4	19,274
280	Sales supervisors	88,000	+4.4	18,577
293	Telephone salespersons	20,000	-0.7	17,397
310	Call and contact centre occupations	43,000	+4.5	15,909
341	Sales and retail assistants	912,000	+5.2	10,802
343	Elementary sales occupations	9,000	-5.8	9,987

There’s roughly ten percent of the assessed working population here. Slightly less than the proportion other surveys suggest are in Sales.

Despite the broad strokes of such data – ambiguous titles, retail/admin blurred lines and the missing ten million workforce – there’s still a worrying trend of reducing earnings.

I wouldn’t normally post such data. Yet neither do some of these figures tally with how our trade is moving (there are surely way more than 17,000 telephone salespeople for instance) nor do they paint a picture of a profession doing well. After all, if we as a group were “winning”, we couldn’t possibly be seeing such slight increases in rewards, let alone a couple of the huge falls.

Then how unsettling is the finding that 54,000 Purchasing Managers are making £52k, with a further 48,000 Buying & Procurement Officers taking home £32k?

Anyway, if you’re part of the slither doing well, time to make sure you’re getting your (significant and deserved) slice of your sales.