Saturday, January 28th, 2017

Collaborating to change

Some 18 months ago, BT Global Services set out on a major programme of sales and marketing transformation. We talk to Chris Blundell about the story so far. There was a time when Chris Blundell spent his time driving from customer to customer in a yellow van – back in the day Blundell was a telecom engineer. Now, however, his… 

Saturday, September 3rd, 2016

Re-sharpening the customer focus in B2B markets: understanding selling as “marketing in action”

In today’s ultra-competitive markets it is imperative that salespeople work to continuously sharpen their customer focus. By comparing the new model of personal selling with the marketing process, this article provides an agenda for helping to make it happen. Introduction Despite the rise of online selling, in many markets – especially B2B – personal selling remains a critical component of… 

Thursday, April 7th, 2016

Identifying your ideal customers

Bob Apollo on Building Scalable Businesses Market segmentation has traditionally been based on demographic factors such as company size, sector and location. But these simple characteristics are hopelessly inadequate predictors of which specific organisations you should focus your marketing and sales energies on. That’s because in any complex B2B sales environment, there will be a set of specific unique-to-you structural,… 

Saturday, October 31st, 2015

Align or die?

How do we re-engineer the sales and marketing interface for the benefit of our customers? Just as I sat down to write this article my email pinged. I tried to ignore it as I’d just come back from an excellent “Sales-Mind“ workshop that reminded me of the foolishness of multitasking. Then I saw the title – “Brands failing to align… 

Monday, July 6th, 2015

Crossing the Chasm

Bob Apollo, Managing Partner at Inflexion-Point and Journal columnist says: “I’ve been inspired by Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore, which many regard as the bible for technology marketers, and very relevant to selling”. +

Tuesday, April 7th, 2015

“Crossing the Chasm” revisited

When Geoffrey Moore published the first edition of Crossing the Chasm over 20 years ago, it rapidly became a B2B sales and marketing classic – rated by Inc. magazine as one of the top-ten marketing books of all time. Moore’s focus on the behavioural chasm that exists between innovators and pragmatist buyers was a revelation to a generation of technology…