Thursday, September 29th, 2022
Why is storytelling so powerful?
Stories are not only enduring; they help drive business. Telling stories is what humans do; it is fundamental to the human experience. We’ve been telling stories for tens of millennia: 30,000 years at least. Cave paintings in the Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, located in the Auvergne district of France, date back 30,000 years and represent the oldest known storyboard to be…
Tuesday, January 11th, 2022
The power of relationships and purpose
Digital is enhancing the way we manage business and sales organisations, but analytics are underpinned by relationships and human behaviours. The value tied up in customer relationships is vast but hard to measure; purpose is now a profit centre and predictable human behaviours can help us to forecast sales more accurately. These were just three of the key takeaways from…
Monday, January 10th, 2022
Character to lead
We interviewed Kelly Garramone and Phil Styrlund to understand how character is a key driver of organisational success in sales. They explained how sales organisations can take part in some ground-breaking research that will drive performance. What is character science? Pioneered by Dr Fred Kiel (amongst others), character science is a new field of study that was born out of…
Friday, April 23rd, 2021
Landmark merger for UK sales profession
What does the merger mean for the sales profession as a whole? AH: In the UK, this clears up what people have been potentially confused about: one body being more focused on the custodianship of sales and the standards of sales, and the other being perhaps more commercial – open to sponsorship and doing magazines and award ceremonies. I think…
Friday, April 23rd, 2021
Supercharging sales
UK lawmakers warn that Britain is suffering from a shortage of salespeople and sales skills. MPs say much more needs to be done to recruit and train people with strong B2B selling skills. Last month’s report by Westminster’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for Professional Sales underlined a persistent problem for the sales profession in the United Kingdom: quite simply, not enough…
Friday, February 26th, 2021
4 key sales reads
Four new books written by distinguished contributors to the Journal offer business leaders, sales professionals, students and academics new insights and guidance as they seek to navigate the complexities of selling and sales leadership today. Each of the authors delivers that rare combination of academic credibility and practical business experience. Sales Management That Works by Frank V Cespedes Rather than moving…
Friday, February 26th, 2021
Fast forward to the future
Waldemar Adams explains how SAP’s sales organisation moved quickly to adapt in a year of dramatic change. iJosT: What do you think are the most important issues around sales currently? W A: What we see is that we are anyhow in a transition in the world of selling that has now accelerated because of the pandemic situation. Most of it…
Thursday, July 9th, 2020
Latest courses for students and apprentices
Never before have there been so many options for students, apprentices and aspiring sales professionals to study and gain valuable qualifications and commercial experience. Academic sales programmes are available to those anticipating a sales career either as university and college courses for undergraduate students on leaving school or at postgraduate level. Postgraduate options (often aimed at more experienced individuals) include…
Friday, May 22nd, 2020
Sales and the COVID crisis
We asked leading academics, professional bodies and consultants for their views on how sales leaders can best respond to the COVID-19 crisis. Unprecedented is a word we hear being bandied about a lot since the emergence of the COVID-19 virus. Nevertheless, the situation we all face is indeed unprecedented, and the world will never be exactly the same again, even…
Friday, December 13th, 2019
Pushing boundaries
SAP’s Manal Siddiqui discusses cricket, qualification and his career. Manal Siddiqui has an infectious enthusiasm for cricket and work, these probably being the two things he loves most in the world, aside from his family. Indeed, when pressed, the former under-19 UAE international cricketer jokes: “Cricket is my first love, you know; that’s what I keep telling my wife, ‘You…
Friday, December 13th, 2019
Transformation is emotional
David Norris explains how participation in the Leading Sales Transformation Masters programme is reinforcing an ethos of continuous improvement at industrial giant SKF. Like most companies, bearings, seals, lubrication and rotating equipment systems specialists SKF operates an annual performance review system. At an individual review, David Norris, Sales Director United Kingdom & Ireland, presented his manager with an outline development…
Friday, December 13th, 2019
A story of epic endurance
Barry Gray is preparing for the last great polar challenge. Here he talks mind-set and leadership. As Barry “Baz” Gray prepares to follow in the footsteps of his hero Sir Ernest Shackleton, he has a sense of history and his potential place amongst the pantheon of polar explorers. “For me it’s about doing something that’s never been done,” the former…
Tuesday, June 25th, 2019
Courage and curiosity
Nilgün Atasoy’s wide experience, open mindset and empathetic approach have opened doors in her career. Nilgün Atasoy specialises in expanding horizons. From her multicultural upbringing to her progression in the traditionally male-dominated technology sector, to her trailblazing role as one of SAP’s first female salespeople in the Middle East and a pioneering woman sales manager in Eastern Europe, she has…
Tuesday, June 25th, 2019
Blazing the trail for women sales leaders in technology
Dutch ICT Woman of the Year, Monic van Aarle is a sales director working with a diverse range of SAP’s customers in the Netherlands. Monic van Aarle has been working at SAP for 15 years and in sales for a total of 37 years – which stacks up to a significant amount of experience. Starting her career in marketing, she…
Tuesday, December 18th, 2018
Sales enablement, AI and other hot topics
As the business world is increasingly disrupted by digital, sales enablement is coming of age. Is this relatively new discipline the key to competitive success for sales organisations? A variety of sales enablement hot topics were on the agenda at Miller Heiman’s 2018 Sales Enablement Summit at the Nobu Hotel in London on 8 November. Not least was the fact…
Tuesday, December 18th, 2018
GST focuses on disruption and resilience
Consalia graduates and keynote speakers came together to discuss strategies to thrive in today’s disruptive business environment. As the business environment becomes ever more uncertain, with constantly accelerating change and increasing market disruption, both organisations and individuals need to become more resilient. But what kind of toll does this disruption take and how can we become more resilient? These were…
Tuesday, December 18th, 2018
SPIN Selling
In this series of articles we look at some of the most popular sales methodologies. What’s the difference between a methodology and a process? In sales, the methodology is the application of general – possibly universal – principles to the way we approach a component of the sales cycle albeit that it may also be contextual. A process, in contrast,…
Monday, September 24th, 2018
Relentless change: can sales enablement keep up?
This article extracts some of the key points from a talk at this year’s Sales Educators’ Academy Conference at Aston Business School in Birmingham, and the debate that followed. The presentation on strategic sales enablement in the face of unrelenting change was given by Robert Racine, VP, Global Sales Enablement at Wipro. Racine ran a central sales enablement function today…
Monday, September 24th, 2018
Social selling – five key concepts
Social selling is still about conversations. But you will need to update your sales model. All of us in sales are well aware that the way people buy has changed. Salespeople are no longer part of the buying process “by right”. Thanks to the Internet, buyers are better informed and more autonomous than ever before. Somehow we have to be…
Friday, May 18th, 2018
Challenged to transform
We talk a lot about transformation but how often does training involve genuine transformation? In the case of global software and services giant SAP there was an urgent need for a thorough transformation in the way the organisation sold, driven by major disruption in the market caused by the migration of IT systems away from an on-premises model onto the…