What is the dirty word, you might ask?

We often have a peculiar mindset in New Brunswick. We build brilliant products. We develop innovative solutions. We create world-class services. And then we whisper about them apologetically, as if success requires permission rather than celebration.

You guessed right, we've made sales a dirty word. And it's costing us dearly.

New Brunswick business icon, Gerry Pond, has been passionate about this challenge for years, and his vision is clear: if New Brunswick wants to compete globally, we must fundamentally change how we think about and teach professional sales. The New Brunswick Business Council shares Gerry’s sense of urgency. It's time for our business community, educational institutions, and economic development leaders to step up.

The Problem We Can’t Ignore

We dance around it with euphemisms like business development, customer acquisition, revenue growth, basically, anything to avoid saying what it really is. This cultural aversion to sales is holding us back.

The numbers tell the story. Over 70% of Canadian businesses struggle to recruit professional salespeople. The Atlantic provinces face significant skills gaps in critical sales competencies, especially those needed for complex, high-value deals. Most alarming: 40% of large Canadian businesses don't sell internationally at all. Nearly half of our biggest companies have confined themselves to a market of 40 million when there's a world of 8 billion potential customers out there.

This isn't a market condition. It's a mindset problem.

What Professional Sales Really Means

Modern professional sales isn't about manipulation or pushy tactics.

It's consultative, analytical, and strategic. It's about understanding customer needs, building lasting relationships, solving complex problems, and creating genuine value. Personal selling represents the largest marketing expenditure in organizations, three times more than all other marketing expenses combined. When done right, it's a business’s most effective growth engine.

Sales skills are essential for everything: acquiring capital, securing customers, innovating with partners, building teams, executing growth strategies, and even advancing social responsibility initiatives. Without sales capability, businesses simply cannot grow.

Sales Drives Growth and Innovation

Sales isn't just about generating revenue.

It's about growth and scaling, which drive productivity and force organizations to innovate. Growing companies must find creative ways to operate more quickly and efficiently to beat competitors. They develop better systems, attract stronger talent, and build sustainable competitive advantages. Growing companies become innovation engines.

And we need growth that looks beyond our borders. The era of comfortable domestic markets is over. With shifting trade dynamics, rising nationalism, and unprecedented global competition, we cannot afford to be timid.

We need deliberate, strategic international sales capabilities, now.

The Founder's Dilemma

This mindset of aversion to sales plagues founders as well. Talented entrepreneurs sabotage their own ventures because they refuse to embrace sales. They build incredible products but can't articulate their value and then wait for customers to discover them. They attend networking events but feel uncomfortable following up, so opportunities are lost.

The research is clear: founder reluctance to engage in selling activities is one of the primary barriers to startup success. This isn't about natural ability, it's about mindset. Founders who view sales as something they can’t do, or as something they'll hire for later, rarely make it.

In the early stages of a company, the founder is the only person who truly understands the vision, the problem being solved, and the passion driving the solution. No hired salesperson can replicate that.

The founder who won't sell is the founder who fails. It's that simple.

Business Education Must Evolve

Gerry Pond’s vision challenges traditional business education.

Today, the actual act of acquiring customers, the thing that makes every business viable, is somehow seen as less worthy of serious academic attention.

Teaching accounting, finance, operations, and marketing isn't enough anymore. We need to redesign business programs around two core themes: building businesses and growing them globally. Sales must be woven throughout, not as an elective or single course, but as a fundamental competency integrated into every aspect of the curriculum.

Students need practical, experiential learning. They must learn to identify international opportunities, build cross-cultural relationships, position products in competitive markets, navigate complex sales cycles, analyze customer needs, and close deals that generate long-term value. This requires partnerships with companies that have successfully scaled globally. Our post-secondary institutions need to respond to this reality, and quickly.

Sales is the difference between survival and success. Between local and global. Between ideas and impact.

Remember, sales is not a dirty word.