Why I Started Digital Tech Sales Academy

Nobody ever taught me how to sell technology. I learned it the way almost everyone in Africa's digital economy learns it, by getting it wrong in front of real clients until I started getting it right. Twenty years later, that experience is the reason I founded [Digital Tech Sales Academy](https://digitaltechsalesacademy.com), a school built to give Africa's digital and technology sales professionals the training I never had. My first degree is in Education, from the University of Ibadan. I mention that early because it took me two decades to notice that my career had been quietly circling back to it the whole time. I started out in advertising at Insight Publicis and left as Head of Digital Business, pitching and defending digital budgets for brands like Pepsi, Heineken, MTN, Coca-Cola, FCMB and Nestlé at a time when digital was still the first line item most marketing directors wanted to cut. That was where I learned that selling digital is not the same as selling advertising. You are not simply selling a product. You are selling a new way of thinking about how a business grows. From there I crossed to the client side at Jumia, first as VP of Performance Marketing and later as VP of Advertising, building an advertising business inside Africa's largest ecommerce platform. Suddenly I was the buyer being pitched to, and I saw how few salespeople genuinely understood the person sitting on my side of the table. Meta came next. I served as Agency Partner for Sub-Saharan Africa and led the rollout of Meta's Authorised Sales Partnership programme across the continent. Today, at Aleph, I lead digital advertising sales across Sub-Saharan Africa for some of the biggest platforms in the world, including Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, Spotify, Uber and Pinterest. Agency side. Client side. Platform side. Three seats at the same table, and from every one of them I kept seeing the same gap. Africa's technology industry keeps producing brilliant builders. Engineers, product managers, founders. What it is not producing in anything close to the numbers needed is people who can sell what gets built. I have sat in boardrooms in Lagos, Accra, Nairobi and Johannesburg watching genuinely good products die quiet commercial deaths. Not because the market did not need them, but because the people selling them had been trained, if they were trained at all, to sell consumer goods, insurance or banking products. Selling a SaaS subscription, an advertising platform or a technology partnership is a different craft entirely. The sales cycles are longer, the stakeholders are many, the buyer needs educating, and every conversation carries real commercial weight. The salespeople themselves had no path either. Over the years I have trained marketing, sales and ecommerce teams for Nestlé, MTN, Jumia, Meta, Konga and many others, and the same thing happened in every single session. Someone would stay behind afterwards and ask where they could learn this properly. Not a one-day workshop. A real, structured education in digital sales and technology sales. The honest answer was nowhere. The most commercially valuable career in the digital economy, the job that pays for every engineer, every server and every product roadmap, had no school anywhere on the continent. I believe selling is a craft, and crafts can be taught. What no textbook can teach is the pattern recognition that comes from twenty years of real deals. The pitch that collapsed at the final meeting. The renewal that rescued a quarter. The partnership that took eighteen months of patience to close. All of that experience was sitting in my head doing nobody any good, and I come from a family of teachers with a teaching degree I had never formally used. So I built [Digital Tech Sales Academy](https://digitaltechsalesacademy.com). It exists to do one thing well. It trains the people who sell digital products, digital media and technology across Africa, with practical, structured sales training built from real deals and real quotas rather than classroom theory. It is the tech sales training programme I wish had existed when I was learning everything the hard way. There is a bigger reason too. A career in tech sales is the widest door into the digital economy. You do not need a computer science degree to walk through it. For a continent with the youngest population on earth, serious commercial talent is not just a business opportunity. It is infrastructure. Twenty years after leaving university with a degree in Education, I am finally using it. If you sell technology or digital products, if you lead a sales team that does, or if you want to start a career in tech sales anywhere in Africa, visit [digitaltechsalesacademy.com](https://digitaltechsalesacademy.com). And if you would like to talk about digital sales training for your team, email me at [me@martins.com.ng](mailto:me@martins.com.ng) or connect with me on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanmartins).