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Q: What do you see as the “new sales normal” emerging post-Covid? What will be different from before over the longer term? Mark Davies: A few things, all of which were trends that were occurring anyway (the Covid-forced recession has just accelerated these trends). Firstly, the trend whereby customers buy via digital channels will intensify. This is because customers know…
As tech companies move to digitize the front office, digital start-ups have been flooded with cash in recent years, as they search for a way to use historical data such as emails and customer call logs to help average salespeople emulate the best. The following passages (in double quotes) taken from a recent story in Fortune magazine ask whether AI…
A 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…
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…
In sales, acquiring new business and expanding existing relationships is not the same thing – in which case, why do so many companies have the same conversations with prospects as they do with customers? Over the past two years we have undertaken new, original research focused on existing customer conversations. After a decade of hype surrounding the provocative selling approach,…
There is a general recognition – backed by the latest research from CSO Insights and others – that sales organisations that have adopted a structured approach to selling consistently and often dramatically outperform their less-effective competitors. One of the key foundations of a structured approach to selling involves the adoption of an appropriate sales methodology. You might think of these…
What is the “Fourth Value Conversation”? We asked Tim Riesterer, author of The Three Value Conversations. Q: What is the “Fourth Value Conversation” and why is there a need for it now? We’re calling it “Expand Value”. It’s that part of the customer conversation lifecycle where you’re looking to ensure more renewals, communicate price increases and generate upsells and cross-sells…
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…
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…
As 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…
Bob Apollo on Building Scalable Businesses Account-based marketing (ABM), along with its all-embracing cousin “account-based everything”, have been touted by its promoters as a miracle cure capable of halting the precipitate decline in conventional marketing effectiveness – and derided by cynical detractors as just another over-hyped trend. As with most new(ish) trends, the reality is probably somewhere in between. The…
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,…
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…
Sales talent analytics can drive competitive advantage and unlock new sources of corporate wealth. Pretty much everyone these days has heard of “big data”, but how many firms are actually using it to unlock new sources of corporate wealth in connection with their talent? Let’s start at the beginning: what is big data? Google defines it as: “Extremely large data…
“More human than human”: The motto of the Tyrell Corporation, from the 1982 film Blade Runner. Recently watching that movie again, in preparation for a showing of the sequel Blade Runner 2049, I was struck (as I often am) by the interesting differences in what we can imagine the future to be like for different technologies. Of course, Blade Runner…
Despite evidence that diversifying leadership teams can increase both innovation and revenue, many organisations are struggling to make it a reality – and few appear to be making visible progress. What are leaders in this space doing differently and what are the critical interventions that work to drive tangible impacts? We report on the D&I findings from Consalia’s 12th annual…
Is artificial intelligence set to free salespeople from the most tedious aspects of their jobs? We talked to Miller Heiman president and CEO Byron Matthews. It will come as no surprise that, today, salespeople spend only around a third of their time on core selling activities in front of a customer trying to understand their needs, according to Byron Matthews,…
Digital is set to disrupt every aspect of life including business. So what’s on the horizon for sales and what’s already here? One day in the not too far distant future, a wave of technological innovation will transform society: for instance, brain-computer interfaces will replace keyboards; there will be intention-decoding algorithms; communications devices will be embedded in humans; and we…
Almost six years on since the publication of The Challenger Sale by CEB authors, we consider the principles of the wider disruptive selling approach and discuss their application in the field and what the future holds for provocative selling. In a 2012 Harvard Business Review article titled “The End of Solution Sales”, authors Brent Adamson and Matt Dixon identified a…
