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

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

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… 

Thursday, April 10th, 2025

Sales Tips 101 – Making a career of sales

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Tuesday, September 5th, 2023

Transform for the future

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… 

Tuesday, September 5th, 2023

Becoming an effective coach

Following on from our new Sales Tips 101 column, Bob Apollo presents a parallel series of tips for sales managers, starting with the “Keys to effective coaching”. Coaching is perhaps the most important task of any sales manager, and the thing most likely to impact their team’s performance. Here are five principles to bear in mind when developing our ability… 

Friday, September 1st, 2023

First-time manager

Navigating the transition from sales to sales management. For many successful and ambitious salespeople, their first move into sales management is perhaps the defining moment in their career. Some will succeed. Some will fail. Some will make the move and then wish they had never abandoned the simpler life of a salesperson. And some will remain perfectly happy avoiding the… 

Monday, April 26th, 2021

Do millennials have a chance?

“When we listen and celebrate what is both common and different, we become a wiser and more inclusive and a better organisation” – Pat Wadors, head of HR at LinkedIn. At SAP, we have set ourselves a target of achieving 10% of young talent in our workforce in South East Asia (SEA) by 2023. This is a two-fold increase from… 

Tuesday, May 26th, 2020

People-centred change

This project explores a new approach to change management to enable better value for people. “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change” To a certain extent, I agree with this quote, attributed to Einstein, not because it is from a man recognised as a genius, but because it seems to make sense. There is a qualifying aspect in… 

Tuesday, May 26th, 2020

Igniting a SPARK

How to introduce a collaborative change methodology to further support embedding of a sales academy into an organization. “How will I introduce a collaborative change methodology to further support the embedding of the SPARK Sales Academy into our organisation?” Simon Sinek (2011) tells us to start with “why”. My concern begins to formulate by asking myself, “Why did my sales… 

Saturday, April 22nd, 2017

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Nick Lee on… Statistical significance testing List time around, I explained the concept of endogeneity bias, and how it might influence how much trust you can have in the results of studies you see reported in the media, and also research projects and white papers you might read yourself. This time, I’m going to deal with the other major problem… 

Saturday, January 28th, 2017

Endogeneity bias

For the past few columns, I introduced critical issues in designing your own research, with a special focus on how to design experiments. For the next few columns, I’m going to build on those pieces to some extent, to explore a set of issues that I see as perhaps even more important – and especially so in today’s world. Specifically,… 

Saturday, September 3rd, 2016

Acting Like a Scientist

In the last issue of the Journal, I wrote about the importance of thinking like a scientist. In simple terms, this is the process of asking the right questions, and avoiding assumptions and ideologies about what “should” be the right answer. If you’ve digested that column, and are ready to think about how best to go about answering those questions,…