Thursday, April 10th, 2025
Sales Tips 101 – Making a career of sales
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Wednesday, April 9th, 2025
Hitting the right notes in sales
How can leading indicators, when integrated into the Sales Management System and aligned with leadership practices and organizational culture, enhance predictability, foster customercentricity, and drive sustainable sales transformation within a complex, matrixed organization like SAP? Conducting the symphony in sales In the vibrant world of sales, the role of a leader may be associated to that of a conductor of…
Tuesday, April 8th, 2025
Retaining top sales talent
How do you hang onto the good salespeople your employ? Enhancing mental health and well-being in sales organisations is key. Retaining top sales talent is a growing challenge for sales leaders. Sales professionals today operate in a competitive marketplace where opportunities are abundant, and organisations must ensure they provide compelling reasons for their best people to stay. The ability to…
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…
Tuesday, April 8th, 2025
A global sales playbook
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…
Monday, September 30th, 2024
A technology teammate
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
AI in sales: view from our experts
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…
Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024
Establishing trust with your sales team
Sales managers need to both trust and be trusted by their sales team. Here are a few of the most important ways in which this can be established: +
Monday, February 19th, 2024
What salespeople need to succeed in a new sales role
Of course, every new salesperson needs to have a clear understanding of what they are selling. But product knowledge is never enough to ensure success. Bob Apollo lists five things every new (and existing) salesperson needs to master: +
Monday, February 19th, 2024
Five things to consider before stepping up to a sales management role
For many salespeople, their obvious career goal is to advance into sales management. Unfortunately, this can turn into a frustrating move. Here’s what aspiring sales managers need to consider: +
Friday, February 16th, 2024
Your first day
What should a salesperson expect from their first few days in a new sales role? I suppose this article could have been titled “What do I wish I had known or done in my first day as a salesperson?” And maybe I might have benefited from reading it then – but that was a long time ago, and in a…
Friday, October 13th, 2023
Addressing individual underperformance
Sales managers have a responsibility to identify, understand and address the root causes of individual underperformance in their teams. Here are a few of the key considerations: +
Wednesday, October 11th, 2023
Addressing underperformance
Underperformance is not just about the individual; it can be a structural issue too. It would be an exceptionally lucky or gifted sales manager who has never had to address the issue of underperformance at some stage in their management career. Sometimes the causes appear to be external – changes in the market environment over which we have little influence…
Wednesday, October 11th, 2023
Coaching conversations
My Coaching Promise ensures sales professionals have better sales conversations. In today’s hybrid world of both face-to-face and virtual customer conversations, ensuring the best of the limited time we get with customers is paramount. I find it odd that it’s taken for granted that sports professionals have multiple coaches, yet sales professionals struggle to get time with their managers, who…
Wednesday, September 6th, 2023
My Coaching Promise
Developing a contract between coachee and coach works to improve virtual sales coaching. +
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…
Thursday, July 6th, 2023
Build deeper connections
Understanding best practices for a buyer-centric sales approach. A buyer-centric approach to selling is table stakes in today’s competitive business landscape – and yet, buyer-centric approaches across companies and industries seem to be vastly different. It begs the question: How do sales leaders and sales representatives interpret buyer-centricity and are they aligned on its crucial components? To further explore this…
Thursday, July 6th, 2023
The top five sales myths
Maybe it’s time to re-examine what you may have always taken for granted. Salespeople are born not made Whilst having confidence, a positive attitude and being generally likeable are all useful traits, they do not guarantee success in sales. The skills required to be effective take years to learn and hone. Too many sellers are thrown in at the deep…
Wednesday, July 5th, 2023
Sales leaders should position technology as “teammate”
Analysts suggests that sales organizations which actively position technology as a “teammate” for sellers – rather than just another tool – will unlock seller productivity and enable highquality deals. Speakers at the Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference 2023, in Las Vegas on 16-17 May, explored how technology – particularly artificial intelligence – is key in augmenting the unique value…
