18Mar/116

How Big is the Sales Profession?

At the most recent Sales 2.0 conference, there was reference made to the number of salespeople in the United States. We were told that there were 18 million salespeople in the United States and that, by 2020, there would only be 3 million. Given the fact that my livelihood is derived from helping salespeople sell better, that number piqued my interest.

So I did some digging...

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of salespeople has already dropped! They report 13,715,050 people are in sales and sales-related occupations. Seriously, a difference like that probably means a difference in how we define "salespeople."

In any event, the BLS number means about 4.3% of the population is in sales! Because that includes retail and counter-sales positions, it makes sense that the number will be less by 2020. After all, retail and counter-sales positions are faltering as transactional purchases go online.

However, I was also interested in what's going on in a few large pockets of the country, so I took a peak at the percentage of the population in sales jobs in the ten biggest Metropolitan Areas:

  1. New York: 4.5%
  2. Los Angeles: 4.3%
  3. Chicago: 4.7%
  4. Dallas: 5.1%
  5. Philadelphia: 4.8%
  6. Houston: 4.5%
  7. Miami: 5.2%
  8. Washington, D.C.: 4.5%
  9. Atlanta: 4.5%
  10. Boston: 5.4%

As an aside, my “science” was loose: the sales number came from the BLS and the population of each MSA came from the census bureau. I'm not a statistician, just a curious salesperson.

@JebBrooks

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Comments (6) Trackbacks (2)
  1. Greg Alexander
    March 20th, 2011 - 09:35

    Jeb- Thanks for doing the leg work on this. Our friends in the sales improvement industry throw around numbers at times with very little behind them. This is dangerous. For example, last week I was working with a CSO with a sales force of 763 and he was citing the CSO Insights 2011 SPO Report. I explained to him that 58% of the respondents of this particular survey are from companies with fewer than 25 reps. He rightfully determined that the data in this report should not be part of his decison making data set.

    Your post hopefully brings some discipline to our industry.

  2. Jeb Brooks
    March 21st, 2011 - 07:03

    Thanks, Greg. There’s a lot more we could do with these numbers to drill down even more.

  3. Jeff Blackwell
    April 13th, 2011 - 21:06

    Hello Jeb,

    (1) To my knowledge the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment estimates do not include self-employed workers.

    (2) To my knowledge all of the sales and related occupations in the Occupational Outlook Handbook (2010-11 Edition) with the exception of “Travel Agents” are expecting growth over the 2008–18 period.

  4. Jeb Brooks
    April 19th, 2011 - 12:27

    Thanks for the information, Jeff!

    - Jeb Brooks

  5. Don Shapiro
    May 9th, 2011 - 13:43

    The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides a very deep break down of the number of people in every occupation by industry. Unfortunately, their website can be difficult to navigate because they have so many different reports. Here is their report on the number of salespeople by each industry in 2008 and their projections for 2018. At that time, they showed a little over 14 million total. About 8.5 million were in retail. There were 4 million in manufacturing and 1.5 million in wholesale just to give you some summary statistics. The actual report breaks these numbers down to every major SIC code industry. You want to know how many salespeople there are in mining, it’s there.

    ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ep/ind-occ.matrix/occ_pdf/occ_41-0000.pdf

    Hope this helps,

    Don

  6. Jeb Brooks
    May 10th, 2011 - 10:13

    Thanks, Don. That’s very helpful.


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