Thursday, October 1st, 2015
Notes from Japan
Roger Byatt offers his personal reflections on…
Thursday, October 1st, 2015
How comfortable are sales managers in their roles?
Key takeaways There are clear common themes across all regions, especially notable is Planning and organising. “You would have thought that this would be a key factor for sales managers to be strong but clearly not!” comments Andrew Dugdale of SalesAssessment.com, the company that provided the data. Also notable by its absence is Interpersonal sensitivity – “yet another key sales…
Tuesday, July 7th, 2015
Global gaps in core sales skills
Methodology This dataset was provided by a sample of 500 people who sat the Core Sales Skills module of SalesAssessment.com’s Universal Sales Skills Audit (USSA) during Q1 2015. The sample consisted of a block of anonymised data, with a random start point in the USSA candidate database. This random sample included candidates from the UK, USA, Dubai, Jordan and Egypt….
Monday, July 6th, 2015
Have you thought about this?
Tim Riesterer, chief strategy officer at Corporate Visions, explains why articulating a customer’s “unconsidered needs” can make you stand out. The proposition Does the following scenario sound familiar? It’s your first sales conversation with a prospect in the field. There you are, face-to-face with a potential buyer, launching into your pitch. So far, so good. Why wouldn’t it be? You…
Monday, July 6th, 2015
2015 Q3 Research Review – edited by Jeremy Noad
These pages aim to keep readers informed of recent published research on sales-related topics, by including abstracts of a selection of peer-reviewed academic material published in a range of journals. We have grouped them in the following broad themes: sales performance; customer management; capability development; behavioural studies; leadership; and systems and processes. In this edition, we start with two articles…
Monday, July 6th, 2015
Personal growth leads to business growth
As part of his MSc Professional Practice in Sales Leadership, Sony Mobile’s Gustavo Mancera describes how research and reflection led to a new mind-set and approach that created differentiation in the marketplace. The problem to be addressed The rapidly changing market affected the entire team´s mind-sets including myself. We had fallen prey to negative mind-sets (Squire, 2009) while struggling to…
Sunday, July 5th, 2015
Standing room only
Pitches, pricing, people, psychology and professionalism –…
Saturday, July 4th, 2015
TACK International buyer survey
Development specialist TACK International is set to unveil the findings from the 7th edition of its “Buyers’ Views of Salespeople” study at the National Sales Conference on 8 October. Previous research identified that price is not always a key purchase motivator. A quarter of respondents indicated that a number of factors were ahead of price in determining their buying decisions:…
Saturday, July 4th, 2015
Employer survey exposes cracks in hiring process
When hiring sales executives, over 58% of employers believed that “salespeople should know what they are doing”, according to joint research from the British Institute for Learning & Development (BILD) and the Universal Sales Skills Audit (USSA). Just over 58% of employers also reported that “maybe some [sales executives] aren’t as good as we would like” and only 38% of…
Sunday, April 12th, 2015
Is sales performance simply down to luck?
Dr Beth Rogers reports from the 8th…
Saturday, April 11th, 2015
2015 Q2 Research Review – edited by Jeremy Noad
These pages aim to keep readers informed of recent published research on sales-related topics, by including abstracts of a selection of peer-reviewed academic material published in a range of journals. We have grouped them in the following broad themes: sales performance; customer management; capability development; behavioural studies; leadership; and systems and processes. Sales Performance “Salespeople as knowledge brokers: a review…
Tuesday, April 7th, 2015
Bridging the gulf between professors and practitioners
As sales continues to develop at breakneck pace, business and academics need to open channels of communication. For well over a century, there have been organised attempts to increase sales professionalism. The case for doing so is nowhere more engagingly expressed than in an editorial appearing in 1884 in the magazine of the Society of Commercial Travelers: “If we do…