A pioneering Master’s programme
March 15th, 2022 by Journal Of Sales TransformationAmbitious sales teams may want to take inspiration from tech giant SAP’s flagship Master’s programme for sales leaders and frontline sales managers. This ten-year sales transformation journey has seen 140+ managers trained to become transformational leaders, representing a unique investment by SAP in its Leaders in Sales – no other company has sustained the costs and efforts around such a…
A new paradigm for CPD in sales
September 28th, 2021 by Colin MacKenzie and Dr Alexander C BauerWhy there needs to be a fresh approach to the personal development of sales executives and their managers. Many readers of this article may already be in superb sales organisations; however, for those in the sales field it will come as no surprise that many small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) have little in the way of formal sales training that could be…
Four steps to embedding ethics
September 27th, 2021 by Mark W JohnstonSales ethics is essential in the new normal. Good business strategy Many companies, even entire industries, struggle to remain open during this ongoing period of challenging economic uncertainty. Business models that were shifting prior to the pandemic, such as the move from instore shopping to e-commerce, have accelerated because of the pandemic. Businesses are adjusting strategies to stay ahead of…
The triumph of data over intuition
April 26th, 2021 by Jamie AndersonHow businesses must adapt to the new world of virtual selling. When the Coronavirus pandemic swept across the world in 2020, it is safe to say that all industries were dramatically disrupted and forced to reassess their operations and ways of working. However, the sales industry was one of the business sectors that was significantly turned on its head by…
Supercharging our sales conversations
April 23rd, 2021 by Bob ApolloSelling power comes not from how much conversation we manage to get through, but the quality of the conversation. Supercharging sales is the overall theme of this edition of the International Journal of Sales Transformation, so I thought it might be appropriate to focus on a topic that has long been a focus of mine: how can salespeople supercharge their…
Growing together (part 2)
September 10th, 2019 by Phil Styrlund and James RobertsonFollowing up on our previous article in last issue of IJST, we continue the discussion on how to best work with your strategic customers to help create joint solutions for growth. What do the best do differently to create joint solutions? Leading companies that excel at collaboratively creating value with their customers are not trying to do a thousand things…
Spotlight on Strategic Selling
September 10th, 2019 by Bob ApolloIn the previous edition of the International Journal of Sales Transformation, I summarised some of the key aspects of the Sandler Selling System. In the second of my series of articles on today’s leading sales methodologies, I want to turn to another long-established approach: Strategic Selling® from the Miller Heiman Group. The Strategic Selling methodology is particularly effective in complex…
Why seamless is important
September 10th, 2019 by Journal Of Sales TransformationEnabling the digital sales force of today and tomorrow
June 26th, 2019 by Claus J BreedeAs the modern workspace is changing and the workforce is becoming more social, mobile and digital, corporate learning functions need to adapt their ways of providing training and enablement. This is especially true when enabling the sales force. SAP’s Learning2Go organisation provides SAP sales colleagues with offerings that harness digital and virtual innovations, empowering them with the most up-to-date and…
Debunking the myths about the future of sales
June 25th, 2019 by Deirdre ColemanA Harvard Business School professor’s insights into the science of sales. In this interview with Deirdre Coleman, Frank Cespedes, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, dispels the myths surrounding technology’s impact on the future of sales and why the need to rethink sales also means rethinking sales leadership. He considers the social and financial impact of sales productivity, and stresses…
Blazing the trail for women sales leaders in technology
June 25th, 2019 by Nick de CentDutch 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…
Growing together
June 25th, 2019 by Phil Styrlund and James RobertsonHow to work with strategic customers to create joint solutions for growth. Article summary Persistent, disruptive forces impacting profitable growth are intensifying, and as a result, companies in many industries face slower growth and accelerating commoditization of product and service margins. Given marketplace complexity and dynamic shifts in how customers buy, traditional business models are threatened and new strategies and…
Achieving mastery
December 18th, 2018 by Journal Of Sales TransformationParticipating in a Masters programme is a significant commitment. We asked two leaders about their journey. “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers” Stephen Gaskell is Director E-Commerce, Retail & Distribution at SONY Mobile. A member of SONY’s leadership programme, he has been on a journey of transformation in establishing his business unit within SONY Mobile. He…
Implementing KAM 2: the KAM Framework
December 18th, 2018 by Javier Marcos, Mark Davies, Rodrigo Guesalaga & Sue HoltAs we explore how to build a KAM programme, we need to consider strategy – customer by customer. In the first article of this series inspired and adapted from our book Implementing KAM, we explored the reasons why KAM is becoming critical for selling organisations and the customers they serve, why a shift towards a customer-centric approach is critical, and…
Strategic enablement gets results
September 24th, 2018 by Tamara SchenkWhy sales enablement is the key to effective sales transformation. Sales enablement is a fast-growing discipline. In our research, we’ve seen the percentage of organizations that reported having a sales enablement initiative or function grow from 19.3% in 2013 to 32.7% in 2016 to 59.2% last year. With so many people getting involved with sales enablement for the first time…
Social selling – five key concepts
September 24th, 2018 by Nick de CentSocial 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…
Sales learning ROI
September 6th, 2018 by Journal Of Sales TransformationSales coaching for the digital age
May 18th, 2018 by Mark CroftonHow Big Data-Driven Coaching has been boosting win rates. Maintaining a position of pre-eminence in the highly competitive IT industry requires leaders to adapt to changes in the business landscape more rapidly than the competition. Continued success also relies on the development of innovative sales enablement techniques that boost performance, help meet customer needs and achieve bottom-line results. Digital Transformation…
Challenged to transform
May 18th, 2018 by Nick de CentWe 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…
Is coaching going AI?
May 17th, 2018 by Professor Nick LeeLast time around, I wrote about artificial intelligence (AI) and sales. More specifically, I speculated on the possible impact of one type of AI – deep learning – on sales as we know it today. I explained that many features of more routinised sales jobs might be amenable to replacement by deep-learning methods, and also that perhaps this might not…