Enough with the sales hype: there is nothing special about sales

I saw this going viral on X/Twitter a few days ago:

In the comments of the above tweet and related ones, I’ve noticed that even among those who strongly subscribe to HBD principles, many carve out an exception for sales, where the less “book-smart” supposedly have a huge edge. Any mention that sales earns less than more technical positions, such as software engineering, or that comission work has inconsistent pay and long hours, is often met with rebuke that sales has much bigger outliers compared to other professions, so it works out to more pay. This makes no sense: how can everyone in any given profession be an outlier?

This veneration of sales or inflated income expectations, is possibly shaped by pop culture depictions of successful salesmen, such as the wealthy stockbroker protagonist Jordan Belfort of the 2013 Martin Scorsese comedy/thriller The Wolf of Wall Street, or Alec Baldwin’s fiery ‘always be closing’ monologue in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Some might be surprised to learn this clip is from an entire movie , which if not for this scene would otherwise be forgotten.

Or by contrived notions of fairness. It seems unfair that smart people excel at so many things, so sales is a convenient exception to restore some needed equilibrium or balance to the universe. Maybe they know people who work in sales or were in sales themselves, and cannot bring themselves to accepting that there is nothing inherently special about the profession.

Lumping all sales jobs together is unhelpful. Sales is extremely broad. Broken down by sub-occupation within the category of ‘sales’, are many sub categories, such as ‘software sales’, ‘retail sales’, or ‘advertising sales’. There is commission sales, in which the salesperson is only paid after rendering a successful sale, an example being Amway. Or a combination of commission and salary, such as a computer salesperson at Best Buy. Or only a salary, typically at a large firm, such as software sales or onboarding large advertisers for Google or Meta contextual advertising.

So how much do salespeople earn? From bls.gov, “The median annual wage for this group was $37,460 in May 2024, which was lower than the median annual wage for all occupations of $49,500.” This is pretty low. However, the inclusion of “cashiers” and “retail sales workers” brings down the average a lot. To be charitable, this seems like a categorical error. Sales typically involves persuasion and interpersonal skills, and some degree of pay-per-performance, not simply ringing up a customer’s order.

From indeed.com, “The average salary for a salesperson is $74,146 per year in the United States and $11,300 commission per year.5.1k salaries taken from job postings on Indeed in the past 36 months.” This figure seems more reasonable by excluding those retail jobs. This is a solidly middle-class income and higher than the median income of the US ($40,000), but it’s nothing to write home about. By comparison, a software engineer earns on average $128k. Quants earn $207k. Doctors (ignoring specialists) earn $245k. So we see the correlation between IQ and profession still holds, as these jobs typically have the highest credentialism or other screening, that indirectly act as IQ filters. Obviously there are exceptions such as pro sports or Hollywood, but in the aggregate, smarter people tend to earn more, and higher-IQ professions pay more compared to less intellectually-selective ones.

Given the choice, most people would likely prefer a position at a leading Silicon Valley or Seattle tech firm-or at Jane Street-over a job at a car dealership, Twitter bravado notwithstanding. Top tech and finance companies are flooded with applicants, but sure, the sales job must be better according to Twitter. From what I can ascertain on Reddit, the majority of car salesmen earn between $60-140k/year. As is the nature of commission work, there is a wide range. But after taking into account the long hours–70 hour weeks are not uncommon–it works out to basically having two jobs, not that there is anything especially lucrative about selling cars. As someone writes, “$100k a year isn’t great money when you’re working 70 hours a week. That’s basically having two $50k jobs.”

As for outliers, tech and finance also has outliers, such as billionaires in AI, VCs, or hedge fund managers. Quant employees can earn tens of millions, without even having to found a firm. Many employees of Jane Street are millionaires. From efinancialcareers.com, “The average total compensation per employee at Jane Street is around $1.4 million per year, based on reports from late 2024 and mid-2025.” So the argument that sales has huge outliers relative to other professions, does not hold water.

Given how some car salesmen earn over $200k/year, it’s possible for outliers at commission sales to outperform white-collar professionals. But it also stands to reason, given how IQ is possibly correlated with success, that smarter people will still have an edge. Sales, like anything else, has a learning curve, so how would smart people not have an advantage. An example is Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Computers, who as a teen devised an ingenious strategy to sell subscriptions, instead of making cold calls. To use myself as an example, I got started in online lead generation, which is a type of commission sales. I was quite successful by developing methods to generate considerable traffic to my landing pages, harnessing the power of Facebook which at the time was seeing rapid growth in the US. But again, the median is what really matters. Not everyone can be an outlier.

An example is livestreaming. The mean is inflated by outliers who earn millions, but the median income is zero. The vast majority of streamers perform to the digital equivalent of an empty auditorium, save for the occasional viewer who stumbles in through an algorithmic recommendation. Commission sales is the same way. The notion that ‘street smart’ people have an edge overlooks the abysmal odds. Outliers by definition are rare, so therefore the vast majority of street-wise people crash and burn at commission sales, podcasting, livestreaming or anything where pay is attached to performance. Survivorships bias means we only see the successful outliers, not those who burn out due to the long hours. Given the popularity of those endeavors and the rarity of high-IQ people, it’s a statistical impossibility that only ‘street-smart people’ can occupy the tiny right-tail of success.

Additionally, there is no evidence to suggest book-smarts comes at a cost or tradeoff of interpersonal skills. ‘Street smarts’ is a vaguely defined concept anyway, much like Howard Gardner’s ‘multiple intelligences’ theory, which even its creator admitted does not have as much predictive power compared to IQ, yet it still lives on in the hearts and minds of educators who wish it were true, much like those people on Twitter who want to believe sales is a ticket to riches for ambitious street-smart types, when for most, it isn’t.