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Tuesday, April 8th, 2025
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…
Tuesday, April 8th, 2025
Why winning globally starts with one consistent sales methodology. Global sales success demands precision, alignment and a relentless focus on delivering value. Yet many sales organizations expand internationally without a unified plan. This haphazard approach leads to fragmented strategies, inconsistent messaging and unpredictable results. To succeed globally, companies need a single, consistent playbook built on a proven sales methodology. This…
Tuesday, April 8th, 2025
Tight budgets, AI’s influence in buying and selling, negative buying experiences, and long purchase cycles are further complicating the B2B buying process and frustrating buyers and sellers alike. According to Forrester’s The State Of Business Buying, 2024 report, 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process and 81% of buyers express dissatisfaction with their chosen providers. While buyers rely…
Monday, April 7th, 2025
What core values should underpin sales from a customer perspective in 2025 and beyond? Back in 2009 a seminal doctoral thesis helped to usher in a new approach to sales: How can a client-centric values approach to selling lead to the co-creation of a new global selling mindset? Dr Philip Squire, who conducted the original research, is looking to run…
Friday, January 10th, 2025
How AI can help to create ideas and boost efficiency for key account managers. Implementing a strategic KAM plan that generates profitable growth for both the supplier and the key customer is notoriously difficult. As consultants and advisers to hundreds of key account managers working in multiple organisations and varied industries, we see talented managers struggle to be consistently effective…
Thursday, January 9th, 2025
How are B2B buyer expectations changing and where is B2B sales headed? In the previous edition of the Journal, we ran a story on McKinsey’s ninth global B2B Pulse report (released 12 September), which questioned 4,000 B2B decision-makers across eight major industries. This identified how B2B suppliers are responding to “consumer-like” purchasing demands from buyers. Here we talk to the…
Wednesday, January 8th, 2025
Investment in enablement tools such as sales content management and automation, training and coaching, buyer engagement, strategy and planning, and recent research is poised to increase, according to a 2024 survey by Seismic, an enablement firm headquartered in San Diego. Generation Enablement Report: The Rise of Enablement’s Influence found that most organisations (89%) plan to retain or increase investment next…
Monday, September 30th, 2024
Whilst AI is unlikely to completely replace salespeople in complex B2B environments, it certainly has the potential to make good salespeople even more effective. Here are a few of the most important ways in which salespeople are using AI: +
Monday, September 30th, 2024
Salespeople have a role to play irrespective of whether AI is a positive or negative influence. Sales organisations will play a key role as AI is deployed and extended into relationship development and business models. Let’s explore two key scenarios: 1) When AI is used in “nefarious” ways and 2) when it is “advantageous” to the client. 1 Nefarious WHEN…
Monday, September 30th, 2024
Good governance and a thought-through approach are essential if we are to use AI responsibly I was seven years old when I made my first sale. The family business provided musical education concerts for children, so in the school holidays I was press-ganged in to help. I quickly found that being front-of-house selling merchandise was much more fun than being…
Monday, September 30th, 2024
Here are five ways to revolutionize sales coaching with AI….. Adoption of AI has exploded over the past year, forever changing the sales profession and bringing about a paradigm shift in sales coaching. This transformative technology offers new ways to enhance performance while nurturing the invaluable human-to-human relationships that underpin successful sales endeavours. Sales professionals have already embraced AI to…
Thursday, September 19th, 2024
Sales professionals and academics discuss the current state of AI in sales, and look to the future. Bob Apollo, Chief Outcomes Officer, Inflexion-Point As we approach the era of AI in business and sales, it is vital to explore what the key tasks will be, as well as the skills and development paths needed to make a success of the…
Thursday, September 19th, 2024
Why safe, responsible, and compliant AI is key to enabling the adoption of AI for sales and marketing. Since the advent of transformer architectures in 2017 and powerful models like GPT-3 in 2023, artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly evolved into a transformative force across industries. Sales and marketing, in particular, can benefit immensely from AI’s ability to revolutionise customer engagement,…
Thursday, September 19th, 2024
How can you harness AI to have better sales conversations? Most independent observers would agree that Artificial Intelligence is unlikely to completely replace skilled and experienced businessto- business salespeople in complex buying environments any time soon. But it is also clear that AI is already capable of enabling skilled and experienced B2B salespeople to become even more effective. Salespeople who…
Thursday, September 19th, 2024
Is AI ready to transform sales? From AI-assisted Raybans that can initiate a call (look cool while you’re phoning clients from the beach) to email subject line generators (fill your prospect’s inbox with annoyingly zany emails), AI has been top of the hype charts ever since Chat GPT broke onto the scene almost two years ago (November 2022). Since then,…
Wednesday, September 18th, 2024
Business-to-business suppliers are under pressure to respond to “consumer-like” purchasing demands as buyers continue to shift the way they make purchases, a new global survey released on 12 September reveals. At the same time, buyers feel more comfortable with remote and selfserve spending on big-ticket items this year than they did in 2022, according to consultants McKinsey & Co. “E-commerce,…
Wednesday, September 18th, 2024
Sales CRM specialist Salesforce introduced two new fully autonomous AI sales agents – Einstein Sales Development Rep (SDR) Agent and Einstein Sales Coach Agent – on 22 August. Generally available in October, these sales agents are built on Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Agentforce Platform to help sales teams accelerate growth. Einstein SDR Agent autonomously engages with inbound prospects to nurture pipeline…
Wednesday, October 11th, 2023
We look into our crystal ball to understand how technology is reshaping business and wider society via Industry 4.0. We recently sat down with Henrik von Scheel, a leading speaker on AI and an expert on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. As the originator of the term, he is highly regarded by businesses and governments for his insight into digital trends….
Wednesday, September 6th, 2023
What will be the impact of artificial intelligence on business? There is a fierce debate (not to mention a lot of hype) surrounding the future impact of artificial intelligence, related both to its potential benefits and also to the not inconsiderable dangers of introducing AI into business and society. On the one hand, AI investment has been growing rapidly over…
Tuesday, September 5th, 2023
Anticipating the future puts you ahead of the game. Here is an innovative guide to driving change. Part I: We couldn’t possibly do that! How the “future readiness movement” began. It was the midst of the pandemic, and it was my first team meeting as I embarked in my new role as the Chief Operating Officer for SAP Asia Pacific…
