The Institute of Sales Professionals (ISP) is bringing together some of the best brains in the business to help us on the road to supporting and professionalising our industry.
The ISP has always prided itself on delivering opportunities for people to form support networks with relationships built on mutual benefit to advance professional sales leadership. More recently, due to the challenges of meeting in person during the pandemic, we have created a range of smaller, informal online sessions to give sales leaders and fellows of the Institute the chance to meet, discuss and share best practice with peers from other organisations. These round-table summits, using Microsoft Teams, have no more than 12 attendees and are hosted by the ISP or a guest who introduces, guides and moderates the conversation to ensure fair engagement and contribution.
In last week’s round table, we reviewed hunter versus farmer sales roles (finding, versus nurturing and growing business opportunities) and looked at an appropriate balance of the two, to give organisations and their customers the best chance of forming relationships based on trust and shared business goals. Click here to see a summary.
A previous round-table meeting addressed reward and remuneration strategies and how to tackle revenue, margin and profit to build high-performing cohesive teams focused on customer experience and business success.
In October, sales leaders from Royal Mail, Virgin Media 02, Domino Printing and Schlumberger discussed what to look for when recruiting salespeople and whether domain knowledge or sales skills are more important. Click to see a summary.
On 24 February we will be discussing the mindset and approach that is vital for collaborative negotiators working in business-to-business (B2B) sales. Purchasing and deal making in the B2B world have seen an increase in competitive procurement practices. Such practices have been driven by the search for the best product or service at the lowest possible price.
In this transactional environment, sellers are pushed to be vendors, and products and services are considered a commodity. It is difficult to create additional value unless sellers manage to encourage buyers towards a two-way environment where both parties can fulfil their own interests in a win-win relationship. This is the mindset of the collaborative negotiator who is a principled, empathic, long-term, creative, patient and hard-working.
If you are a sales leader or an ISP fellow, and would like to join us for this session on Thursday 24 February, click here.
Because these meetings are kept intentionally small, places go quickly so keep a lookout for future round-table summits in our events diary: https://the-aps.com/page/events
We have a further five sessions already booked in, covering topics from large contract management, to successful coaching and mentoring. We hope you will be able to join us.