Tuesday, September 30th, 2025

Safety, problem solving and creating value between organisations

ISP managing director Guy Lloyd and Warwick Business School’s Professor Nick Lee are in conversation with celebrated sales researcher and author Professor Neil Rackham, known for his pioneering sales research and developing the SPIN methodology. Guy Lloyd: What are the big changes you’ve seen in selling activity since you were doing your research for SPIN Selling? Neil Rackham: I think… 


Tuesday, September 30th, 2025

Growing sales is easy…and yet

A sales leader challenges common misconceptions around “silver bullet”, short-term tactics to boost sales. It’s the end of the fiscal period, sales have been tracking well but the OI/EBITDA 1 number isn’t where it should be, so Sales needs to sell more. Its budget time and we grew well last year, but the plan is for up to 40% growth… 


Monday, September 29th, 2025

Five ways for B2B companies to support growth in an uncertain world

Geopolitical events and the macroeconomic environment have combined to make the global operating environment significantly trickier recently, which means B2B companies face notable pressures as they seek to adapt and grow. However, companies can “accelerate toward above-market growth” using five “acceleration levers”, according to strategic consultants McKinsey. McKinsey describes these actions as “practical, highimpact approaches that drive measurable results, particularly… 


Monday, September 29th, 2025

Buyers need human salespeople as guides in complex B2B environments to escape preconceptions

In today’s B2B landscape, buyers conduct significant research and vendor comparisons prior to ever contacting a salesperson. At the same time, vendors assume that buyers are likely to be confident in understanding the problems they are trying to solve, which can lead to sellers failing to conduct a robust discovery process once they do get involved. More paradoxically, however, buyers… 


Monday, September 29th, 2025

Buyers prefer self-service, but choose sellers for key tasks

Buyers favour online self-service tools over sellers when searching for general information and learning new things. However, for buying tasks requiring contextual intelligence, such as determining whether a product or service fits their company’s needs, buyers prefer to seek seller input. That’s according to Alice Walmesley, Director Analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice. “Instead of offering generic information that buyers… 


Monday, September 29th, 2025

Most B2B buyers will prefer human interaction to AI by 2030 – Gartner

While AI-driven solutions offer speed, efficiency, and convenience, especially in the early stages of the sales process, recent analysis suggests that the demand for genuine human engagement is far from diminishing. In fact, by 2030, Gartner predicts that 75% of B2B buyers will prefer sales experiences that prioritise human interaction over AI, prompting organisations to rethink how they structure their… 


Monday, September 29th, 2025

Aviso and Consalia partner to smooth agentic AI adoption

Agentic AI-powered revenue execution platform, Aviso announced a strategic partnership with UK sales business school Consalia on 16 September. The initiative aims to address a critical challenge facing chief revenue officers: sales teams struggling to effectively embed AI tools and autonomous agents into workflows and company culture. “AI succeeds when it aligns with human psychology, not when it fights it,”… 


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

81% of buyers dissatisfied with chosen suppliers – Forrester

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

How do customers want to be sold to in 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… 


Monday, April 7th, 2025

McKinsey boosts digital marketing presence

Marketing leaders who prioritize customer-first marketing capabilities to boost their understanding of customer needs can grow 28% faster than their peers, according to strategic management consultancy McKinsey. The consultancy has stepped up its presence in the digital marketing operations and technology (DMOT) sphere with the acquisition of ET Medialabs (ETML), a leading performance marketing and analytics agency in India. The… 


Monday, April 7th, 2025

Gartner spells out top commercial threats facing sales leaders in 2025

Chief sales officers must evolve with rapid market changes and emerging technological influences to succeed. That’s the message from research and advisory firm, Gartner. As the global marketplace evolves at an unprecedented pace, Gartner says it has identified the top seven commercial threats facing sales leaders in 2025. “There is increasing pressure on leaders to enhance performance amidst macroeconomic fluctuations,”… 


Friday, January 10th, 2025

Five key insights into great KAMs

A major research study uncovers insights into what differentiates top-performing KAMs from the rest. It finds many organisations are focusing on the wrong things in their efforts to improve KAM performance. Key account managers (KAMs) may represent a small fraction of the sales force, but their impact on sales outcomes is disproportionately significant. Despite extensive research on general sales effectiveness,… 


Thursday, January 9th, 2025

Omnichannel, AI and the future of B2B sales

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… 


Monday, September 30th, 2024

The power and pitfalls of AI

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… 


Thursday, September 19th, 2024

The hope and the hype of AI

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

An open letter to supplier CEOs: do you want a huge competitive edge?

Rethink your selling strategy and shift it to a value-based KAM business model. We all know that we are operating in an increasingly complex and competitive marketplace. As such, it is imperative for suppliers to adapt their sales strategies to maintain relevance in order to drive growth. The traditional sales models that once fuelled success are rapidly becoming obsolete. Today,… 


Wednesday, September 18th, 2024

Research highlights six actionable prospecting strategies

Research by a training company suggests that prospecting advice from US sales and marketing executives has remained notably consistent over the past five years. Key findings highlight the importance of personalization and research, value proposition clarity and creative engagement techniques in successful prospecting. “The sales profession has seen seismic shifts, from the rise of remote sales to the proliferation of… 


Wednesday, September 18th, 2024

B2B e-commerce unseats in-person sales for second year running

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,… 


Monday, April 22nd, 2024

Leap of faith

B2B trust research: what’s next? Abstract New academic research on trust will build on insights generated through Mark Hollyoake’s 2020 doctoral thesis (see previous article). They aim to dig deeper into the role of the “Boundary Spanner in relational trust development”, based on eight years of academic research through the University of Southampton. The original research Boundary spanners: What are…