Is Tech Sales Really Different From Sales?

People ask me this all the time, usually young salespeople trying to decide where to build their careers. Is tech sales really different from ordinary sales? After more than two decades of selling ideas, media, platforms and technology across Africa, my honest answer is yes and no. And the space between those two answers is exactly where most sales careers stall. Let me start with the part that never changes. All selling is the same at the bone. Somebody has a problem. You understand that problem better than they expected you to. You earn enough trust for them to spend money on your answer. That was true when I was pitching brand campaigns at Insight Publicis for Pepsi, Heineken and MTN, it was true when I was building the advertising business inside Jumia, and it is true today at Aleph where I lead digital advertising sales across Sub-Saharan Africa. People buy from people. Nobody has repealed that law and nobody will. If you cannot listen, ask a sharp question, handle a no, or follow up without being a pest, no industry will save you. Tech sales will expose you faster, not slower. Now the part that genuinely changes, because it does. First, the product will not sit still. A bottle of Coke is the same product next year. The platforms I sell change every quarter. New formats, new measurement, new policies, new competitors. In tech sales your product knowledge has an expiry date, and it is closer than you think. The sellers who win treat learning as part of the job, not an interruption to it. Second, you are usually selling something the buyer does not fully understand. That changes what selling means. In consumer goods the buyer knows exactly what a case of soap is. When I was selling Jumia advertising to brands, many of them had never bought ecommerce media in their lives. The job was teaching, patiently and honestly, long before it was closing. The best technology sellers I have ever worked with are teachers first. The worst are the ones who mistake jargon for expertise. Third, the room gets crowded. A technology deal rarely has one buyer. There is the person who wants it, the person who pays for it, the person in IT who must approve it, the procurement officer who must squeeze it, and the person whose daily work will change because of it. Any one of them can kill the deal quietly. Selling to a committee is a different skill from selling to a person, and nobody teaches it. You learn it by losing deals you thought you had won. Fourth, you are selling a future, not an inventory. The client is not buying what exists today. They are buying what their business will look like after adoption. That is why proof matters so much in technology. Pilots, data, references, a working demo. Confidence is your real product. Fifth, and this is the one that took me longest to learn, the sale never ends. In traditional sales, closing is the finish line. In technology, closing is the starting gun. If the client does not adopt what they bought, does not use it, does not see the value showing up in their numbers, you will lose them at renewal and deserve to. The best tech sellers manage the relationship after the signature more carefully than before it. So is tech sales different? The craft is the same. The game is different. Same muscles, different sport. Here is why this matters to me. Across Lagos, Accra, Nairobi and Johannesburg I keep meeting salespeople who were trained, if they were trained at all, for the old game. Consumer goods selling, insurance selling, banking selling. Then they get hired into a technology company and nobody tells them the rules changed. Good people fail for bad reasons. That gap is why I founded [Digital Tech Sales Academy](https://digitaltechsalesacademy.com). Africa's technology industry keeps producing brilliant builders and not nearly enough people who can sell what gets built. The craft can be taught. The game can be taught. Somebody just has to teach it. If you sell technology or you want to start, visit [digitaltechsalesacademy.com](https://digitaltechsalesacademy.com). And if you are further along and want someone in your corner, my [mentorship](/mentorship) door is open too.