Thursday, December 12th, 2019

Professional sales and the “differentiation conundrum”

How salespeople can make a difference in helping their organisation stand-out from competitors, in ways that resonate with customers. In our book Value-ology (Kelly, Johnston and Danheiser 2017), we drew attention to Qvidian’s research that showed 58% of deals end up in no decision because the customer has not been convinced of the value being offered, which means your biggest… 


Tuesday, September 10th, 2019

Research identifies three key sales competencies

As B2B buying behaviour evolves, how can sales organisations adapt? This is the third of a series of articles in which Dr Simon Kelly, Dr Paul Johnston and Stacey Danheiser explore customer value and differentiation. In this article they offer an early view into their latest research around the roles and competencies required by salespeople to help their organisations differentiate… 


Tuesday, June 25th, 2019

Selling in a sea of sameness

When your competitors are floating in a sea of sameness you need to make sure you are waving not drowning. In the second of a series of articles in which Dr Simon Kelly and Dr Paul Johnston explore customer value and differentiation, they are joined by co-author Stacey Danheiser to ask: are you selling in a sea of sameness? In… 


Thursday, March 21st, 2019

Putting the value in value propositions

This is the first of a series of articles in which the authors explore customer value and differentiation. In this article Dr Simon Kelly and Dr Paul Johnston consider the importance of customer value and its criticality in building effective value propositions. They draw together their experience as marketing and sales practitioners, their recent academic and commercial research, and their… 


Tuesday, December 18th, 2018

Value propositions: the sales and marketing interface

I reviewed two areas of literature before doing the research which covered sales-marketing interface (SMI) and value propositions. Sales-marketing interface SMI literature primarily focused on “The extent to which activities carried out by the two are supportive of each other” (Rouzies, et al. 2005). SMI research has tended to focus on sales and marketing relations as an end in itself…. 


Saturday, October 31st, 2015

Align or die?

How do we re-engineer the sales and marketing interface for the benefit of our customers? Just as I sat down to write this article my email pinged. I tried to ignore it as I’d just come back from an excellent “Sales-Mind“ workshop that reminded me of the foolishness of multitasking. Then I saw the title – “Brands failing to align…