About Bob Apollo

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So far Bob Apollo has created 44 blog entries.

Is your CRM System a Sales Prevention System?

Most sales organisations have some sort of CRM system in place. Many have made significant investments in the system. Yet simply implementing CRM – just like just running a sales training course – offers no “magic wand” for improving sales performance. In fact the energies expended on them are often wasted. Time after time, we come across Customer Relationship Management solutions that bear little or no relation to how a vendors’ most promising prospects actually buy, or what the vendors’ top performing sales people actually do. There are 5 danger signs that indicate that a CRM system READ MORE ›

By |Alignment, Sales, Tactics, Velocity|
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Are you trying to solve too many problems?

I don’t know about you, but I’m always uneasy when a CEO describes his or her strategy and somewhere along the way you hear a variation on the “after all, how hard can it be to grab a small share of a big market” argument? Well, the answer is always “a lot harder than you think”. The only thing aiming for an overlarge target market does for you is to dilute your efforts to the point where even those modest ambitions are unlikely to ever be achieved. Actually, that’s wrong - that strategy brings with it a READ MORE ›

By |Strategy|
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6 Critical Foundations of the new “Solution Selling”

Faced with increasing competition, commoditisation and margin erosion, most B2B vendors have chosen to embrace “solution selling” in one form or another. But, as many have learned to their cost, simply slapping solution lipstick on a product pig tends to be a cost-added, rather than a value-added strategy. Applying solution selling in today’s increasingly well-educated and often justifiably cynical buying environment requires a profound change in mindset and selling (and marketing) behaviour that many companies never manage to properly master - but the ones that do usually reap substantial rewards. Having observed some of the best exponents READ MORE ›

By |Sales, Skills|
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What’s holding your business back? Try this 12-point action framework

What would happen if you were able to double your sales and marketing resources overnight? Assuming that you haven’t already saturated your target market, how confident are you that you could at least double your revenues - and how long would that take? What if you were able to quadruple your resources? This question often poses a problem for B2B-focused organisations with long and complex sales cycles, or for sales teams that have a long history of relying on sales heroics. Without a well-defined, scalable sales and marketing process, no matter how much resource you can throw READ MORE ›

By |Tactics|
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