Tuesday, July 28th, 2026

2026 DMA awards open

The 2026 DMA Awards opened for entries on 7 July. The Data & Marketing Association (DMA) is inviting brands, agencies, charities, marketing and technology partners to submit the campaigns, programmes and innovations that have defined the past year. Now in its 46th year, the DMA Awards is among the UK’s longestrunning marketing awards, recognising work that combines strategic thinking, outstanding… 


Tuesday, July 28th, 2026

Unify tech around a single view of the buyer

In today’s tech world, when it comes to prospecting, the strongest performers unify channels, workflows, and reporting around a single view of the buyer. However, fragmentation and lack of integration is holding sales teams back, according to a whitepaper from B2B outreach specialists Sopro. The Brighton-based lead-gen company argues that, while sales and marketing organisations now use a growing mix… 


Tuesday, July 28th, 2026

Journal’s come home

The International Journal of Sales Transformation has reverted to its original ownership, following a year under the auspices of the Institute of Sales Professionals. Founding editor Nick de Cent says: “I’d like to thank the ISP for their input to the Journal and offering us a home for a year. We are excited now to be going forward as an… 


Thursday, July 16th, 2026

News Roundup

Journal’s come home The International Journal of Sales Transformation has reverted to its original ownership, following a year under the auspices of the Institute of Sales Professionals. Founding editor Nick de Cent says: “I’d like to thank the ISP for their input to the Journal and offering us a home for a year. We are excited now to be going… 


Thursday, July 16th, 2026

AI happening faster than value creation says McKinsey

96% of CMOs are excited about AI, yet 71% express anxiety and 80% believe AI could put their own role at risk. Artificial intelligence could unlock up to $90 billion in improved marketing returns in the US alone, according to new research. Yet, fewer than 10% of organisations have successfully scaled AI across marketing or captured AI’s true value across… 


Thursday, July 16th, 2026

Another B2B reckoning

What defines a “supplier-switch” moment for customers has shifted for a third time in a decade.  Rising buyer expectations and the acceleration of AI capabilities are driving a wedge between B2B market growth leaders and laggards. This divide may prove to be deeper than both the consumerisation of business buying and the surge in e-commerce self-serve that emerged during the… 


Thursday, July 16th, 2026

Top sales talent: it’s a sellers’ market

Why hiring great salespeople is a negotiation between two parties who both need to do their homework – it’s definitely not a one-way selection process. Anyone involved in sales recruitment for high-impact roles complains about the same thing: there just aren’t enough outstanding salespeople to go round. It’s not a new problem. Indeed, the underlying scarcity of genuinely top-performing salespeople… 


Wednesday, July 15th, 2026

Bridging the divide

How sales and marketing can thrive together in the AI age. Sales and marketing have always shared the same ultimate objective: driving growth and revenue. Yet the relationship between the two departments hasn’t always been seamless, and it remains an issue even in 2026. When sales and marketing operate in silos, inconsistent messaging and misaligned goals can cause friction and… 


Friday, March 13th, 2026

A question of (purchase) complexity

In a world where technology has outpaced the theory, how do we define a new operating framework for sales and marketing? Here is a question that, in my view at least, should not still need asking in 2026: what is the actual difference between marketing and sales? Ask ten senior commercial leaders and you will get ten different answers. Ask… 


Friday, March 13th, 2026

Gartner survey reveals widening AI literacy gap among CMOs

Some 65% of chief marketing officers say advances in AI will dramatically change the CMO role in the next two years, a recent Gartner survey reveals. Yet only 32% say significant changes are needed to the CMO profile and skill set, according to the business and technology insights company. Conducted from August through October 2025 among 402 senior marketing leaders… 


Friday, March 13th, 2026

Sales Leadership 101 – Are sales and marketing aligned around the customer?

Use this checklist to assess your current interface with marketing – and the customer. If you can’t answer “yes” to the following questions or don’t know the answers, it may be time to revisit the alignment between sales and marketing in your organisation – and your customer focus. 1. Go-to-market strategy 2. Buyer confidence and customer focus 3. KPIs, accountability… 


Friday, March 13th, 2026

A game of two halves

Are sales and marketing functions strategically aligned to optimise business? We asked a range of experts – practitioners, academics and consultants – six questions about the interaction of sales and marketing in a B2B environment. We sought their views on how well sales and marketing organisations typically collaborate to support the aims of a business. We asked them how the… 


Friday, March 13th, 2026

Building bridges between sales and marketing

For businesses to thrive, sales and marketing need to reforge their relationship. I’ve been writing about sales and sales management since the mid-1980s – that’s around 40 years. For almost 20 years, I was heading up a marketing communications agency. So, I’ve observed the sales and marketing relationship from both perspectives. During much of that time it is fair to… 


Friday, March 13th, 2026

A strategic approach to ABM

ABM Is no longer a marketing tactic; it’s a commercial operating model. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has an identity crisis, but not because it is losing relevance. Quite the opposite. ABM has become so commercially potent that describing it as a marketing approach is no longer accurate.  In nine years of running the Global ABM Conference, we have witnessed ABM evolve… 


Friday, March 13th, 2026

A critical new mandate for marketing

What if marketing, sales, sales enablement, and customer success align around a mandate to eliminate barriers to buyer confidence and ensure customers achieve their desired business. There’s a growing recognition that the challenge in complex B2B sales isn’t just about creating demand or building pipeline. The challenge lies in ensuring that we eliminate the barriers to buyer confidence – before,… 


Friday, March 13th, 2026

By 2028 AI agents will outnumber sellers tenfold – Gartner

With AI agents poised to reshape sales, sales leaders must rethink strategies to unlock true value, business and technology insights company, Gartner warns. By 2028, AI agents will outnumber human sellers by ten times, yet fewer than 40% of sellers will report that AI agents have improved their productivity, it claims. As AI agents become ubiquitous, Gartner advises that sales… 


Friday, March 13th, 2026

Beyond the “war”: 20 years of research on the sales and marketing interface

20 years on from HBR’s seminal “Ending the War” paper, how can business leaders align sales and marketing to maximise market performance? When Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, and Sujay Krishnaswamy published “Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing” in Harvard Business Review (2006), they gave managers a language for an enduring organisational tension. Sales and marketing, they argued, were structurally… 


Friday, November 21st, 2025

Agents of change

Top tips for sales teams to get started with agentic AI. The next transformation in sales is already underway. One where AI moves from predicting outcomes to acting on them. Agentic AI, powered by generative models, is beginning to shoulder parts of the coordination, analysis, and execution that have long slowed down sales teams. By handling structured tasks, it frees… 


Friday, November 21st, 2025

NEWS ROUNDUP

What is workslop? A recent article in Harvard Business Review coins a new term: “workslop” – poor-quality but plausible-looking work created using AI that is not fit for purpose. HBR defines workslop as “AI-generated work content that masquarades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task”. Research by the BetterUp Labs team, in collaboration with… 


Monday, September 29th, 2025

There is no silver bullet

Why the future of B2B selling must be situationally adaptive. For decades, authors of books about selling have sought to promote the perfect methodology – the idea that there is “one best way” to sell. Whether SPIN, Challenger, Value Selling, Sandler, Miller-Heiman, MEDDPICC or many other approaches, each has claimed to provide the formula for sales success. But in today’s…