Latest News

Hiring, developing and retaining salespeople have been something of a dark art. It’s often expensive and inefficient, but new talent-management techniques are bringing us into the 21st century. Skilled professionals have credibility with customers, and you can’t afford to compromise the credibility of your brand by sending second-best into the field Dr Beth Rogers In their 2015 Harvard Business Review… 

For the past couple of columns, I’ve been discussing various issues around how to think scientifically and do experiments. In this column, what I want to do is bring a close to this series by presenting a couple of basic designs that could be used to generate knowledge of what works and what doesn’t in sales forces, including a “not-quite-experimental”… 

Jim Collins’ Good to Great has been the inspiration for many CEOs who are determined to elevate their companies from run-of-the-mill to lasting greatness. There are many lessons to be learned from the book but one of the most significant is the idea that, before organisations can stand a chance of realising their potential, they must get the right people… 

Two important sales competitions are taking place in Scotland next year. The 4th European Sales competition will be held at Edinburgh Napier Business School’s Craiglockhart campus in Edinburgh on 31 May and 1 June 2017. This event has already secured sponsorship from the likes of Salesforce, Oracle, Gartner and RBS, according to one of the organisers, Dr Tony Douglas, Associate… 

More universities need to teach sales – that’s according to Frank Cespedes and Daniel Weinfurter writing in the Harvard Business Review. “For decades, Sales and Academia remained worlds apart and the business world did fine. But Sales is changing, Academia is out of touch, and this is bad for business and the academy,” the authors write. The argue that more… 

CEB (Corporate Executive Board) – best known for its Challenger programme – and Consalia have announced a pioneering Masters (MSc) qualification for professionals involved in complex sales. The launch accompanies the announcement of a partnership between the two organisations. The move is designed to bring new “rigour” and enhanced capabilities for sales transformation between global insight and technology giant CEB… 

The Association of Professional Sales (APS) has announced a partnership with one of the sales world’s leading training, consultancy and research groups, Huthwaite International. The APS says that its new skills partner Huthwaite will “bring fresh insight and research to the profession, as well as working hard to drive the highest standards of quality and excellence across the sales industry”…. 

In a bid to develop the country’s best salespeople, accounting software giant Sage has launched a scheme to train more than 400 employees to be Certified sales professionals. The programme runs in conjunction with the Association of Professional Sales (APS) and training partner Silent Edge. “At Sage, we are all about creating a high performance, customer-obsessed culture that is underpinned… 

We asked three fi nalists in the… 

When organisations talk about their sales process, they are usually thinking in terms of a sequence of sales activities, typically encapsulated in a series of pipeline stages, which are designed to move a prospect from first contact to a successful sale. There’s overwhelming research to prove that having a formalised sales process has helped many organisations to improve sales performance…. 

Dr Roy Whitten and Scott Roy discuss what to do before the pitch and how to do it. The biggest problem my salespeople have is that they just don’t listen well enough!” The speaker was vice-president and director of sales for a division of one of the world’s largest telecoms companies. He continued: “Or, if they do listen, they only… 

In the last issue of the Journal, I wrote about the importance of thinking like a scientist. In simple terms, this is the process of asking the right questions, and avoiding assumptions and ideologies about what “should” be the right answer. If you’ve digested that column, and are ready to think about how best to go about answering those questions,… 

Bob Apollo on Building Scalable Businesses In the majority of sales organisations, a high percentage of sales revenue is generated by the same minority of top sales performers, quarter after quarter. According to research published by the CEB in The Challenger Sale, this performance gap between top salespeople and the rest is amplified in complex, high-value sales environments. They found… 

A majority of sales leaders in the UK believe that they will suffer a decline in business following the decision to leave the European Union, according to a poll conducted by the Association of Professional Sales (APS) in the immediate aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. Just under two thirds (63%) of those who took part in… 

Sales leaders and other senior executives are playing a waiting game following the UK’s 23 June referendum vote to leave the European Union. At the same time, many respondents to an International Journal of Sales Transformation survey were going into an information-gathering cycle to understand the repercussions in relation to their customers and markets. Some 90 senior businesspeople from around… 

Cranfield School of Management’s KAM Club is 20 years old. Where is key account management headed over the next 20? Economic, technology and consumer trends were all on the agenda as key account managers, academics and speakers gathered to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Key Account Management Best Practice Club at the Cranfield School of Management, 16-17 March. Participants… 

It pays to take time to learn about Asian culture and etiquette if you want to do business in this thriving region. In the ever-shrinking global landscape, expanding your experience to include an overseas placement is fast becoming mandatory. Forcing yourself out of your cultural comfort zone and into an unfamiliar environment gives you the opportunity to blend information and… 

How business development is proving to have a transformational impact on the sales and business process. The term “business development” will conjure up different connotations depending on who you canvass opinion from; it often gets classed as demand generation or inside sales to name but a few. In fact the roles that these functions perform and the skillsets required are… 

AstraZeneca’s Florent Edouard discusses how cross-functional working equips pharma to compete in today’s complex healthcare ecosystem. To succeed in today’s competitive landscape, pharma teams need not only to be motivated, but also diverse in terms of business origins, male-female ratio, their geographic mix, and a blend of experienced versus new blood, digital versus traditional, analytical versus emotional, and strategy versus… 

Are you, your team members or your customers relationship driven, achievement driven or growth driven? It makes a difference. Brian Tracy in his many books and tapesI claims that 50% of any sale is a “transfer of enthusiasm”; in other words, it is something quite independent of the skill sets that so many organisations spend so much money investing in….