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… 


Monday, September 29th, 2025

Buyers need human salespeople as guides in complex B2B environments to escape preconceptions

In today’s B2B landscape, buyers conduct significant research and vendor comparisons prior to ever contacting a salesperson. At the same time, vendors assume that buyers are likely to be confident in understanding the problems they are trying to solve, which can lead to sellers failing to conduct a robust discovery process once they do get involved. More paradoxically, however, buyers… 


Monday, September 29th, 2025

Buyers prefer self-service, but choose sellers for key tasks

Buyers favour online self-service tools over sellers when searching for general information and learning new things. However, for buying tasks requiring contextual intelligence, such as determining whether a product or service fits their company’s needs, buyers prefer to seek seller input. That’s according to Alice Walmesley, Director Analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice. “Instead of offering generic information that buyers… 


Monday, September 29th, 2025

Most B2B buyers will prefer human interaction to AI by 2030 – Gartner

While AI-driven solutions offer speed, efficiency, and convenience, especially in the early stages of the sales process, recent analysis suggests that the demand for genuine human engagement is far from diminishing. In fact, by 2030, Gartner predicts that 75% of B2B buyers will prefer sales experiences that prioritise human interaction over AI, prompting organisations to rethink how they structure their… 


Monday, September 29th, 2025

Aviso and Consalia partner to smooth agentic AI adoption

Agentic AI-powered revenue execution platform, Aviso announced a strategic partnership with UK sales business school Consalia on 16 September. The initiative aims to address a critical challenge facing chief revenue officers: sales teams struggling to effectively embed AI tools and autonomous agents into workflows and company culture. “AI succeeds when it aligns with human psychology, not when it fights it,”… 


Monday, July 7th, 2025

30% of genAI initiatives to fail in 2025 – Gartner

Gartner suggested last year that at least 30% of generative AI businesses in the testing phase would be abandoned after proof of concept by the end of 2025, according to a report in AI Business. Organisations have been struggling to justify genAI investments due to the substantial costs involved. The analyst firm found that early genAI adopters were finding that… 


Monday, July 7th, 2025

Consumers wary of social media

Consumers report that social media is their least trusted source when making buying decisions; at the same time, it’s where they interact with family and friends, who also serve as their most trusted sources. These are among the latest findings in a 9 June article from consultants McKinsey: “State of the Consumer 2025: When disruption becomes permanent”. When ranking sources… 


Monday, July 7th, 2025

Success in an “AI-first” world

Top-performing go-to-market teams have aligned on three objectives that unlock success in a so-called “AI-first” world, according to the State of Sales Enablement Report 2025 from enablement platform Highspot. The survey found: The 11th edition of the State of Sales Enablement Report surveyed some 350 enablement (46%), marketing (21%), sales (12%), and revenue operations (10%) professionals. +


Tuesday, April 8th, 2025

Making a career of sales

There is no doubt that sales can be an excellent and satisfying career. As a reader of this Journal, I hope that you already believe this as strongly as I do. I am encouraged by the work being done by a growing number of schools, educational establishments and bodies like the UK’s Institute of Sales Professionals (ISP) to establish and…