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Trang Chu is an executive leadership coach and founder of Tallgrass Way where she works with high-profile executives in investment banking, private equity and law firms. Previously, she was a managing director at Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch. She explains how success correlates as closely to confidence as competence. She can be contacted on www.trangtchu.com. Companies that embrace diversity tend… 

Annmarie Neal is Chief Talent Officer, Hellman & Friedman LLC, and has held the same role in both Cisco Systems and First Data Corporation. She is also the founder of the Centre for Leadership Innovation. She explains how having a strong sense of self is probably one of the most essential traits of leadership. There are several reasons why women… 

Dr Beth Rogers PFHEA is a sales educationalist and researcher at the University of Portsmouth Business School. Her advice to employers is to improve their sales pitch when it comes to attracting female talent and focus on rewarding those who deliver results, not “face time” in the office. The distribution of women in sales across various industries and different levels… 

Nicola Robinson is UK & International Sales Director, Kettle Foods and was previously Field Sales Director, Coca-Cola Enterprises. Winner of Best Sales Director, Women in Sales Awards 2014, she shares her advice for women starting a career in sales and why she’d like to see more open dialogue on the supports needed to retain female talent. She talks to Deirdre… 

Too many women believe that if they keep their heads down, work hard and meet their targets, they’ll be recognised as sales experts on the merits of their work and rise through the ranks. However, what really separates successful sales leaders from the pack is their ability to self-promote. We’re all aware of the depressingly disproportionate number of women at… 

Hiring and onboarding is an expensive and time-consuming process. It pays to get it right. The costs of recruitment are on the rise again, with an increase of around 50% from 24 months ago, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development; meanwhile, four out of five employers are saying that the competition for well-qualified talent has increased over… 

Professor Mark Johnston explores the conundrum of the high-performing, low ethics salesperson. Organizations strive to hire, train, develop and enable salespeople to reach a high level of performance. Of course, as every sales manager knows, only a few can truly be considered “high performers”. Research on high-performing salespeople suggests they are different and often require sales managers to “adjust” their… 

Nick Lee on… The myth of natural talent Why the superstar culture is bad for both the “stars” and the rest of the team. One of the more pervasive ideas in the popular perception of success in almost any field is that of the “natural”. What I mean is that we humans appear to be almost hardwired to explain the… 

Bob Apollo on Building Scalable Businesses What can businesses do to ensure that they establish the platform for predictable, reliable and sustainable revenue and market share growth? I’m going to assume that you have a product or service that people want to buy. But that’s clearly not enough. I want to highlight three critical (and timeless) principles that have always… 

Ethics is the foundation stone for trust between sellers and buyers. A core task for all sales professionals is to ethically balance responsibility to shareholders with a duty of integrity towards customers. At work, sales professionals are much more likely to be driven by following rules than in their personal lives. Rules are an insufficiently robust mechanism to guide behaviour… 

Sales professionals now have a new option to gain a high-status sales qualification. This year, Middlesex University – in conjunction with global sales transformation company Consalia – is making its award-winning Masters programmes available to individuals and small groups for the first time. Consalia marketing director Phil Linter tells the Journal: “Previously we’ve only been able to offer professional sales… 

Research organization Forrester forecasts that 12% of all B2B sales in the United States will take place online by 2020. Last year, the company caused a few ripples when it predicted that the number of B2B salespeople in the United States would contract by one million over the next five years. In a recent report in the series, The B2B… 

We asked three women for their views… 

Authenticity, cultural fit and solving client problems are just some of keys to selling professional services, reports Chris Alder. Too many people in professional services do too little to understand the business of their clients – let alone clients’ specific issues and concerns. That’s a startling conclusion from a white paper published by sales training specialists Huthwaite International.1 Add in… 

Dr Beth Rogers ask whether the “Internet of Things” is set to transform the sales paradigm yet further. Imagine a future where customers’ needs are met even before the customer has identified them or a salesperson has prompted for them. It is a future where the role of the salesperson is focused on high-profile change projects, rooted in idea generation… 

The rewards for going after a choice piece of business can be huge, but making the right decisions can mean life or death. In today’s fiercely competitive environment the consequences of failure can indeed be career changing – for all the wrong reasons. Qualifying sales opportunities effectively is arguably the most important thing any company large or small will do,… 

What can we discover from research about the best way of dealing with problem salespeople? In the 15 years I have spent working with frontline sales managers, one particular issue has loomed larger than any other. Specifically, when a sales manager is faced with a problem with one or more of their salespeople, how best should they deal with it?… 

Sales organisations in Europe may be facing the prospect of having to pay salespeople without an office base for the time they spend travelling to and from first and last appointments. This follows the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling that journeys from home to work and back should be treated as working time. The EJC ruling could mean some… 

Power imbalances between companies of different types and sizes do not prevent them from establishing successful relationships, as long as both organisations’ business strategies are compatible. The development of trust in business-to-business relationships calls for “goal congruence”, according to a recent University of Eastern Finland and Cranfield University study. Authors, Mika Gabrielsson, Professor of International Business of the University of… 

There are significant opportunities for salespeople to chase as the market opens up and customers search for increased value and innovation from suppliers, not just lower prices. That’s one of the principal findings from a global survey of buyers launched at the UK’s National Sales Conference in Coventry on 8 October. Introduced at the event by managing director Sam North,…