Tuesday, July 28th, 2026

2026 DMA awards open

The 2026 DMA Awards opened for entries on 7 July. The Data & Marketing Association (DMA) is inviting brands, agencies, charities, marketing and technology partners to submit the campaigns, programmes and innovations that have defined the past year. Now in its 46th year, the DMA Awards is among the UK’s longestrunning marketing awards, recognising work that combines strategic thinking, outstanding… 


Tuesday, July 28th, 2026

Unify tech around a single view of the buyer

In today’s tech world, when it comes to prospecting, the strongest performers unify channels, workflows, and reporting around a single view of the buyer. However, fragmentation and lack of integration is holding sales teams back, according to a whitepaper from B2B outreach specialists Sopro. The Brighton-based lead-gen company argues that, while sales and marketing organisations now use a growing mix… 


Tuesday, July 28th, 2026

Journal’s come home

The International Journal of Sales Transformation has reverted to its original ownership, following a year under the auspices of the Institute of Sales Professionals. Founding editor Nick de Cent says: “I’d like to thank the ISP for their input to the Journal and offering us a home for a year. We are excited now to be going forward as an… 


Thursday, July 16th, 2026

News Roundup

Journal’s come home The International Journal of Sales Transformation has reverted to its original ownership, following a year under the auspices of the Institute of Sales Professionals. Founding editor Nick de Cent says: “I’d like to thank the ISP for their input to the Journal and offering us a home for a year. We are excited now to be going… 


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

Gartner survey reveals widening AI literacy gap among CMOs

Some 65% of chief marketing officers say advances in AI will dramatically change the CMO role in the next two years, a recent Gartner survey reveals. Yet only 32% say significant changes are needed to the CMO profile and skill set, according to the business and technology insights company. Conducted from August through October 2025 among 402 senior marketing leaders… 


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

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… 


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… 


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, 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,… 


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

Safe, ethical and compliant

Why safe, responsible, and compliant AI is key to enabling the adoption of AI for sales and marketing. Since the advent of transformer architectures in 2017 and powerful models like GPT-3 in 2023, artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly evolved into a transformative force across industries. Sales and marketing, in particular, can benefit immensely from AI’s ability to revolutionise customer engagement,…