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The separation between Sales and Marketing departments stems from years of operating autonomously. The divide can be deeply ingrained in businesses processes and culture, and the problem isn’t solved by a loose agreement between department heads to work more closely together.

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Professor John Hoffmire, a lecturer in disruptive innovation at Peking University’s HSBC Business School. We spent several hours discussing disruptive tactics to gain market share, brand notoriety and industry dominance, and John shared a deep insight into what the term “disruption” actually means.

What does it mean when a salesperson “sells on a different level”? Take sales skills out of the equation, along with a winning mindset, because these are a given to succeed. What mechanisms enable someone to do more deals, more quickly? The answer lies in who you know and the ability to find and target the right people to get stuff done.

Gone are the days when a complex monthly report was the first sight that managers had of their team’s success or otherwise: this data is now easily available in real time, which allows for flexible goals to be set, monitored, and re-aligned on the fly.

Salespeople are always looking for ways to shortcut success. Some get lucky, but luck can’t be relied on consistently. The following ten attributes are ways to differentiate yourself when starting in sales and quickly climb the ladder.

There are three types of competitors. The first is competing products, the second is inaction, and the third is your potential customer. When selling software solutions to the global corporate and investment banking community, I can't count how often my customers’ IT department pitched to build my product “in house”. Similarly, I faced this problem when taking my first tech startup to market

There is great value in hiring an external consultant to diagnose poor sales performance, help streamline the business, and scale sales processes. The following five items summarise what I learnt from consulting for companies in the past few months:

As part of my 2017 commitment to read and review one book per week, here is the latest instalment of quality sales books from the past two months. (Click the book cover to see the full review).