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Ambitious 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… 

Reports from the Q2 and Q3 sessions While things are slowly returning to normal, the Cranfield KAM Forum seminars are continuing to complement the regular face-to face meetings that will resume when it is safe to do so. The webinars continue to address both strategic and operational themes and personal development topics of interest for key account managers. In this… 

Digital is enhancing the way we manage business and sales organisations, but analytics are underpinned by relationships and human behaviours. The value tied up in customer relationships is vast but hard to measure; purpose is now a profit centre and predictable human behaviours can help us to forecast sales more accurately. These were just three of the key takeaways from… 

Three perspectives on enhancing sales skills through sales competitions. Introduction The USA has led the way in developing and promoting sales competitions for university students. However, this dominance is quietly being challenged by the Europeans and universities across Southeast Asia. There are different factors at play around the world as well as alternative pedogeological approaches. This article discusses the challenges… 

How embedded is coaching in your organisation? Introduction In the past few decades, coaching has become an established professional learning method. Some sales organisations have dedicated staff coaches, but leaders tend to underuse coaching to tap into the full potential and motivation of their teams. Frequently job ads for sales leaders include the requirement to coach; however, many feel underequipped,… 

It’s all about time, skills and mindset. Successful sales managers must master a range of important skills. They need to make sure that they recruit the right people and help them to realise their potential, encourage their teams to follow and contribute to the organisation’s learned best practices, ensure that opportunities are well-qualified, that pipelines are well managed and that… 

Rod Barthet, CEO, Kyocera Document Solutions UK; Iain Masson, RVP UK & Nordics, Showpad Q: What are the top-three new agenda items that sales leaders will be thinking about for 2022? IM: Buying behaviours have evolved tremendously throughout the digital age, seeing the most accelerated growth specifically throughout the pandemic, and sellers must rapidly adapt accordingly. Working and living in… 

Australian Institute of Sales, New Zealand Institute of Sales – Stuart Edmunds, Director; Association of Professional Sales – Andrew Hough, CEO Stuart Edmund’s overview from New Zealand In reality, we’re probably not a lot different from anywhere else in the world – more of the same, but different, and we’ll have twice what we needed pre-pandemic in the post-pandemic world…. 

Waldemar Adams, Global Senior Vice President, SAP Customer Success COO Office; Grant Van Ulbrich, Director, Sales Transformation – International, Royal Caribbean International Q: What will be the top-three agenda items for sales leaders as businesses emerge from the pandemic? WA: 1) Ensure customer success. 2) Budget achievement and growth plans. 3) Manage their teams successfully, with empathy. GVU: Our focus… 

Mark Davies, Founder, Segment Pulse Limited, Visiting Fellow, Centre for Strategic Marketing and Sales, Cranfield School of Management, and The Advanced Services Group, Aston Business School; Dr Mark Hollyoake, Director, Customer Attuned and Associate Lecturer, University of the West of England; Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer, Corporate Visions; Dr Philip Squire, CEO, Consalia; Philip Styrlund, CEO, The Summit Group Introductory… 

Dr Frank Cespedes, senior lecturer, Harvard Business School; Professor Mark Johnston, Professor of Marketing and Ethics, Rollins College; Professor Nick Lee, Warwick Business School; Dr Colin Mackenzie, specialist lecturer, Edinburgh Napier University; Dr Javier Marcos, Associate Professor, Strategic Sales Management and Negotiation, Cranfield School of Management; Dr Beth Rogers, Visiting Fellow, Cranfield School of Management Q: What will be the… 

In the bold new world of sales, a mental shift is required. The pandemic turned the whole world upside down: it made us shift our priorities away from things that we once thought were important to new ways of working and living. As people switch careers and re-evaluate how they spend their time, naturally their behaviours have fundamentally changed. In… 

What should B2B sales leaders be prioritising in 2022? As we head towards 2022, sales organisations are emerging from a tumultuous two years. Across many markets and industries, the sales function has had to cope with transformational changes that have been compressed into a short period of time. Inevitably, some sales organisations have managed to adapt better than others. They… 

Why 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… 

If we expect our customers to trust us, we need to develop both an internal and an external culture of trust. Trust is an essential foundational element in any sales environment, and it can (and must) take many forms. Perhaps the most obvious manifestation lies in the relationship between the salesperson (and the vendor they represent) and the customer’s decision-making… 

Sales 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… 

GARTNER SUGGESTS EIGHT STEPS TO CREATE COMPETITIVE… 

OVER ONE THIRD (35%) OF UK ONLINE… 

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Cranfield Key Account Management Forum. Here’s what participants discussed in Q1. In 2021 we mark the 25th anniversary of the Key Account Management Forum at Cranfield University. Following the Covid-19 pandemic the Cranfield KAM Forum has created a series of on-line seminars to complement the regular face-to face meetings that will resume… 

Perhaps surprisingly, the nature of anxiety means that it offers an inherent opportunity for personal and professional growth. In high-value and complex B2B sales, ambitious sales targets and growth plans are common. Typically, sales professionals are measured on outcomes they can control only to a certain extent. As they mature in their career, many develop ways of managing sales pressure…