Friday, March 13th, 2026
Five key B2B sales strategies
Warwick Business School has outlined five B2B sales strategies to help businesses thrive in today’s business environment. 1 Turn price transparency into a weapon Proactive transparency, particularly early in the relationship with a customer, actually drives better commercial outcomes. Early cost disclosure led to approximately $1,400 more in backend profits per customer, according to a 2021 paper by by Michael…
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
Buying groups growing larger and procurement becoming more influential says analyst
The typical buying decision now includes 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, with that number rising for more complex or strategic purchases, according to research and advisory firm Forrester. And, while generative AI is fundamentally reshaping how business buyers discover, evaluate, and purchase products and services, it has also become something of a “double-edged sword” in the buying process….
Friday, March 13th, 2026
By 2028 AI agents will outnumber sellers tenfold – Gartner
With AI agents poised to reshape sales, sales leaders must rethink strategies to unlock true value, business and technology insights company, Gartner warns. By 2028, AI agents will outnumber human sellers by ten times, yet fewer than 40% of sellers will report that AI agents have improved their productivity, it claims. As AI agents become ubiquitous, Gartner advises that sales…
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…
Monday, November 24th, 2025
Selling strategic investments
How to use capital budgeting as a sales methodology. Abstract Capital budgeting is a fundamental process in corporate finance involving the evaluation and selection of long-term investments that are in line with a company’s strategic objectives. When employed as a sales methodology, capital budgeting helps sales representatives present their products and services as strategic investments to potential clients. This approach…
Friday, November 21st, 2025
Agents of change
Top tips for sales teams to get started with agentic AI. The next transformation in sales is already underway. One where AI moves from predicting outcomes to acting on them. Agentic AI, powered by generative models, is beginning to shoulder parts of the coordination, analysis, and execution that have long slowed down sales teams. By handling structured tasks, it frees…
Friday, November 21st, 2025
NEWS ROUNDUP
What is workslop? A recent article in Harvard Business Review coins a new term: “workslop” – poor-quality but plausible-looking work created using AI that is not fit for purpose. HBR defines workslop as “AI-generated work content that masquarades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task”. Research by the BetterUp Labs team, in collaboration with…
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,”…