Why digital sales is the missing link in Nigeria’s startup economy
Nigeria’s startup ecosystem is one of the most vibrant on the continent. Venture funding has flowed into fintech, healthtech, and mobility startups. Hubs in Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt are buzzing with innovation, and founders are increasingly building with a global outlook.
Yet, beneath this energy lies a stubborn reality: too many Nigerian startups struggle to scale sustainably.
While capital, a fledgling regulatory environment, and the prevalence of poor infrastructure dominate conversations about barriers to growth, one critical factor is often overlooked: digital sales capability. In other words, our startups know how to build, but too few know how to sell effectively at scale.
Building without selling: The common trap
Across Nigeria’s ecosystem, a familiar pattern emerges. A startup secures seed funding, builds a promising product, and gains early adopters, only to stall when it comes time to expand. The reasons vary: long sales cycles, fragmented market infrastructure, and limited access to high-quality buyer data. But at the heart of the issue is a missing engine for predictable revenue: a modern, data-driven sales system.
Unlike in markets where a startup can “plug into Stripe” and unlock instant payment rails, Nigerian startups face fragmented infrastructure. To serve a pan-African market, they often stitch together multiple providers, each with its own requirements, compliance hurdles, and onboarding processes.
This complexity elongates sales cycles and forces teams to reinvent the wheel rather than scale a tested sales playbook.
Why digital sales matters
Digital sales are more than cold calls or closing deals. It is the discipline of engineering revenue growth. It combines structured go-to-market strategies, customer intelligence, automation, and global best practices to convert innovation into commercial traction.
Done well, digital sales deliver three critical benefits to Nigerian startups:
- Revenue resilience
In volatile markets, predictable revenue is the best hedge against uncertain funding cycles. Sales-led companies can survive funding winters by monetising customers instead of relying solely on venture capital.
2. Global market access
With structured outbound sales, Nigerian startups can sell across borders from day one. Talent in Lagos can close clients in London or São Paulo, expanding total addressable markets far beyond local constraints.
3. Investor confidence
Venture capitalists are no longer satisfied with “growth at all costs”. They demand sustainable unit economics. A strong digital sales system demonstrates scalability, improving both valuation and investor confidence.
Lessons from global and African startups
Companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Stripe grew into global giants because they paired product innovation with sophisticated revenue engines. Even within Africa, fintechs such as Flutterwave and Paystack have shown that commercial excellence is as important as technical ingenuity. Their success demonstrates a clear truth: growth is not accidental; it is designed.
For Nigeria’s ecosystem, this means founders must prioritise building sales teams as deliberately as they build engineering teams. Without this, even the most innovative products risk becoming “zombie startups”, alive but unable to grow.
What needs to change
To unlock the full potential of Nigeria’s startup economy, three shifts are essential:
- Founders must treat sales as a core competency.
From day one, startups should invest in structured go-to-market strategies, not treat sales as an afterthought once funding runs low.
2. Talent development in sales must accelerate.
Nigeria has a growing pool of engineers, but we need just as many skilled sales professionals. This is why I co-founded Tech Sales Starter, a digital-first training platform that has already trained over 300 Nigerians in tech sales, with a 65% job placement rate. By equipping young professionals with practical skills and connecting them to global opportunities, initiatives like this prove that Nigeria can build the commercial talent needed to fuel startup growth.
3. Investors should incentivise revenue discipline.
Rather than celebrating vanity metrics, investors should back startups that demonstrate strong sales conversion, customer retention, and scalable revenue processes.
The path forward
Nigeria has no shortage of entrepreneurial talent or global ambition. What it lacks is an equally strong culture of digital sales excellence. By embedding sales as the missing link in our startup economy, we can shift from a cycle of building and stalling to one of building and scaling.
Through my work at AiPrise and Tech Sales Starter, I’ve seen firsthand how digital sales innovation can transform both companies and careers. If we embed sales excellence as deeply as we embed technical excellence, Nigeria’s startups will not only grow at home but also redefine how the world sees African innovation.
In a world where capital is cautious and competition is fierce, those who sell best will win.
Orewa “Jenny” Olusanya is a revenue growth leader in the tech sector and Head of Revenue Growth, EMEA, at AiPrise, a Y Combinator-backed regtech company, where she built the sales engine that helped grow ARR from under $50,000 to over $1 million. She is also the co-founder of Tech Sales Starter, a digital-first education platform that has trained over 200 young Africans for non-technical careers in tech with a 65% job placement rate.
