What it pays
From £28,745 for sales administrators to £94,135 for marketing, sales and advertising directors.
Median gross annual pay, full-time employees. Each figure belongs to the occupation beside it. There is no average across a profession, because none is measured.
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Marketing, sales and advertising directors
£94,135 -
Sales accounts and business development managers
£57,625 -
Business sales executives
£37,924 -
Telephone salespersons
£30,495 -
Sales administrators
£28,745
Bars are drawn to scale from zero.
ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, 2025 (provisional), from the April 2025 survey. Open Government Licence v3.0.
The jobs it covers
11 occupations sit in this profession, on the government’s own classification. Each one is a page: what the work involves, what you decide, and how you are measured.
How you get into it
The one professional family that genuinely does not care where you came from. Almost nobody plans to go into sales, and the common routes in are customer service, retail and administration.
It is also the least credentialled family here, which cuts both ways: there is no qualification standing between you and the job, and no qualification vouching for you when a target year goes badly.
Sales administration and internal sales are the usual first desk, and they are where you learn the product before you have to carry a number.
The regulated sales and marketing courses, and who awards them
Who employs it
Whether the sale is one conversation or eighteen months of them changes the job more than the industry does. Short-cycle selling is volume and resilience; long-cycle is research, relationships and patience.
Software, professional services and manufacturing carry the longest cycles and the largest deals. Recruitment, media and telecoms carry the shortest.
A commission structure is a description of what the employer wants you to do. Read it before the job description.
What to expect
Pay is the widest spread of any family here and much of it is variable, so the median tells you less than usual. Two people with the same title and employer can be a long way apart.
The step that changes the job is from selling to managing sellers, and it is the one most often taken by the best seller rather than the best manager.
It is unusually measurable work, which makes it unusually exposed. Good years are visible and so are bad ones.
The professional body
Institute of Sales Management
The professional body for selling in the UK, and an awarding body: it sets the qualifications this family is measured by.
Institute of Sales Management’s own site (opens in a new tab) What it awards