Why Vietnamese professionals avoid sales and how to learn it

Many Vietnamese professionals avoid sales because their parents steered them toward medicine or pharmacy and warned them off selling, and because selling means risking judgment. But sales is a skill you can learn: the first seconds of a call, how to size a buyer's problem and how to ask for a decision.

Laurent Nguyen has sold enterprise software for American companies in France and across Europe for 25 years. He is a channel sales manager at Netskope, a cybersecurity company, and trains young salespeople on the side. He once landed Disneyland Paris, a €3.5 million contract, off a single cold call. He also says it took him ten years in the job to stop feeling he should have become a pharmacist. In August 2026 he ran a workshop for OV on how to pitch, influence and close. These are the lessons we would pass on to anyone who has avoided sales so far.

Many of us were raised to avoid sales

Laurent's parents' generation in France went into pharmacy and medicine and told their children to do the same. Sales was the one path they warned him away from. He belongs to a network of Asian salespeople in France, and he says everyone in it grew up hearing the same warning.

Many Overseas Vietnamese will recognize this. The Việt Kiều professionals we meet are doctors, engineers, lawyers, founders, and people in tech and finance. Career salespeople almost never turn up.

The cost shows up later. A founder has to sell to customers and investors. Someone moving to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) has to sell their overseas experience to a hiring manager who has never heard of their last employer. If you are weighing that move, read Moving to Vietnam for your career.

You have about seven seconds on a cold call

When Laurent cold-calls a senior person, he assumes he is interrupting and says so. One opener he uses on a busy executive is that he is taking two nanoseconds of their time. Sometimes they laugh, and once they have laughed they are listening.

He gives you about seven seconds before the other person decides whether to keep listening. Something has to land inside that window: a number, a joke, a question, a word they did not expect. In written outreach he drops in an old French word that has fallen out of use, to show that a person wrote the message.

His other rules for the first moments:

• Leave your title out. Nobody cares that you are a CEO or a marketing director, he says. They care who you are.
• Say a little about yourself, then ask questions and let them answer without interrupting.
• Match their pace. Slow down for a calm executive, speed up for a fast talker, then ease back into your own rhythm once the meeting has settled.
• Do not go monotone. People stop listening to a flat voice.

Laurent says he used to be very shy, and that nobody believes him. Early in his career, speaking in front of a hundred people, he felt naked. The job trained it out of him.

Do not just price the list. Size the problem

A customer sends a list of requirements: products, specifications, quantities. The junior instinct is to price it fast and send it back. Laurent has no patience for that.

"If a customer gives you his shopping list, you are useless. Everybody would do the same."

He challenges the list instead. Why do you need this? He may propose an alternative. Customers respect it, he says, because it shows a professional at work. It only works if you have done the homework on the company first: its strategy, its stated problems and what its leaders have said in recent interviews.

The sharpest question he asks is: what is the risk of doing nothing? He wants a figure. If this problem stays unsolved, what does it cost the company in money or in internal time? Ask it carefully, because people do not like having their nose pushed into their own problems. But a seller who understands the problem and can size it gets listened to, and the buyer now has a number to argue with internally when you are not there.

Ask for the decision before you leave

A good meeting can end with everyone agreeing it went well and nobody asking for anything. Laurent never leaves a call with a senior person without asking for a specific next action.

He uses three closes. None is original, and together they cover the usual ways a decision gets put off:

• Alternative close: option A or option B. You are no longer asking whether, only which.
• Urgency close: a genuine deadline pulls the decision into the present. An invented one uses up the trust you built.
• Summary close: recap the value, then ask plainly for the commitment.

When a buyer stalls, he asks when they can decide. If they say they do not know, he asks what specifically is preventing the decision, and keeps asking. Push softly by default, harder with tough buyers, who he says respect it.

None of this means pleading. His rule:

"Don't beg. Don't beg for anything. Don't beg for love, don't beg for partnership, don't beg for a purchase order."

A buyer can feel when you need the sale more than they need the product. For founders, Starting a business in Vietnam explains why getting customers to pay comes before raising money.

Start by recording a one-minute video

Asked what someone with no sales experience should do first, Laurent's answer was immediate. Record a one-minute video of yourself. Say who you are and why you do what you do. Then watch it.

He estimates 99% of people never do it, because almost nobody likes seeing themselves on a screen. That discomfort is the point. In his view, the two things standing between most people and this skill are ego and fear of being judged, and you cannot fix either by reading about them. You can send the video to a friend, he said, but friends go easy on you.

"The only judge is yourself. The worst enemy in this job is yourself."

After that, record your pitch and watch it back, and practice in the evening instead of scrolling. For a Viet Kieu professional who has always left selling to others, it is a cheap, private place to begin.