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The Association of Professional Sales launched its North West England branch at an event in Manchester on 14 November. Hosted by telecoms giant Vodafone at its Wythenshawe offices, the launch saw digital sales strategist and award-winning technology entrepreneur Warren Knight present a keynote address on the theme of social selling in the digital age. He explained a three-step process to… 

Some 10,000 new level-4 apprentices could soon be joining the UK sales profession every year. That’s the view of Association of Professional Sales joint CEO, Ben Turner. He told the Journal: ”There is no reason why not; there’s not been an employer of any size that has looked at this and said ‘having professionally qualified apprentices in sales is a… 

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… 

Why 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… 

Here we explore designing customer-centric processes for mutual growth. More than three decades of research and managerial practice have informed the development of a solid knowledge base for defining and planning key account management (KAM). Executives attending our KAM training programmes and commissioning consulting interventions tell us time and time again that the crucial challenge is the implementation of KAM…. 

Salespeople are having to work even harder to satisfy buyers across a whole range of metrics. The third edition of the State of Sales report from Salesforce.com’s research arm found that 72% of buyers expect vendors to personalise engagement to their needs, while 79% say It’s easier than ever to take their business elsewhere. Today, customer satisfaction (CSAT) is the… 

Research and advisory firm Gartner has sold its Challenger business to Los Angeles based private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners less than 18 months after acquiring it as part of CEB. Gartner acquired CEB on 6 April 2017 for some $2.6 billion in cash and stock; financial terms of the subsequent sale to Marlin of the business based around the… 

It is with great sadness that we report the passing of Robert Racine on the morning of 3 September. Despite a demanding role as Wipro’s VP, Global Sales Enablement, Robert always found time to contribute to organisations dedicated to furthering our understanding of sales enablement. He was a member of the Journal’s editorial board, a Fellow of the APS, and… 

The primary goal of sales enablement must surely be to increase sales effectiveness by progressively reducing the performance gap between our best sales people and the rest, measured by revenue and other tangible metrics. But it seems to me that a number of sales enablement programmes (typically the less successful ones) have made insufficient efforts to understand the winning behaviours… 

How 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… 

The nature of professional selling has transformed profoundly over the past few decades, resulting in a fundamental redefinition of the role of the sales force. Drawing on a study comprising interview data from 37 senior sales leaders, sales consultants and prominent sales academics from the US, UK and other European countries, I synthesise three key drivers for change and identify… 

Last 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… 

You’ll notice a number of articles elsewhere in this edition on the subject of coaching. I want to use this short piece to focus on an area that has become a particular interest of mine: using coaching techniques to help our salespeople develop more effective opportunity strategies. I’ve observed organisations that do a particularly effective job of opportunity coaching, viewed… 

Successful B2B sales teams need to strike a balance between digital and human sales – that’s the conclusion of May 2018 paper The secret to making it in the digital sales world: The human touch from consultants McKinsey. B2B sales leaders using digital effectively enjoy five times the growth of their peers who are not at the cutting edge of… 

With England’s Department for Education due to ink its approval of the country’s first degree-level B2B sales apprenticeship programme at the end of June, the profession stands at an inflexion point, according to Phil Linter, Degree Apprenticeship Lead at global sales performance improvement specialist Consalia. “We are on the cusp of formally being able to offer the B2B sales degree… 

Academic research has found that reducing gender imbalance in sales teams improves performance. The authors of a paper in Industrial Marketing Management suggest that there is evidence that the addition of women to all-male sales teams should positively impact team performance by: reducing the average turnover rate of high performers within the team; enhancing relational skills, organisational citizenship behaviours, and… 

A poll of 200 IT buyers and 74 suppliers from IT marketplace Probrand.co.uk has found that as many as 1 in 3 think they are getting good deals when it comes to buying IT. Indeed, the survey found that 85% of IT buyers believe that they don’t overpay for IT equipment. Yet additional research conducted using IT benchmarking application, KnowledgeBus… 

Sales leaders have been invited to contribute to the UK government’s strategy on the future of British business and industry. Business Secretary Greg Clark issued the invitation during a visit by members of the Association of Professional Sales (APS) to Westminster on 24 April. Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Sales, the cabinet minister… 

A sales student at the University of Portsmouth has been crowned winner of the 2018 European Sales Competition in Paris. Final-year student George Nodwell is now seen as the best and toughest negotiator among the 56 competitors from 21 European universities and Texas State University, USA. Nodwell told the Journal, which was one of the event sponsors: “It’s been an… 

SAP’s D&I strategy seeks to build a more inclusive workforce and better business results. SAP is in an industry where the pace of innovation separates the winners from the losers, and a greater variety of insights and experiences leads to new ideas and innovations. We recognised this need and embarked on a strategy to ensure we were drawing on and…