Bob Apollo
Bob Apollo
Bob Apollo is the CEO of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the B2B sales performance improvement specialists. Following a varied corporate career, Bob now works with a rapidly expanding client base of B2B-focused growth-phase technology companies, helping them to implement systematic sales processes that drive predictable revenue growth.
It’s time to kick the Shih Tzu out of buyer personas
B2B marketers are directing an increasing percentage of their energy and budget towards content creation. But the consequent focus on quantity rather than quality...
The second most important moment in any B2B sales campaign
There’s a reasonable case to be made that the most important moment in the management of any successful sales opportunity is the point at...
Why B2B Sales has to confront the Value Gap
In survey after survey, the average sales person’s inability to effectively communicate the value of their offering has been rated as the most frustrating...
B2B Sales: Have you worked out what the real problem is?
At face value, having a prospect approach you with a clearly defined problem can seem to be very good news - even better if...
Can you buy in to these 5 Contrarian Concepts?
The problem with slavishly following “best practice” is that it’s almost always what the really smart people (and organisations) used to do. By the...
Acronyms Away! Why COI trumps ROI
I’ve just been reading an article that suggests that ROI (Return on Investment) is some sort of magic bullet that can somehow ensure that...
Organisations have personas too!
The idea of buyer personas seems to be sweeping the world of B2B marketing - another example of a business-to-consumer concept being embraced by...
Why it’s critical that you “nail your niche”
How hard can it be for a new entrant to carve out a 1% share of a very large market? The answer, of course,...
B2B Sales: Why you must systematically target these 3 avoidable errors
Sales people and sales leaders have been regularly urged over the years to adopt “best practices” as a way of improving sales performance. I...
Why sales processes need to support artisans – not create automatons
The evidence that formalised sales processes improve sales performance is absolutely overwhelming - a raft of studies have shown that companies that have implemented...
McKinsey help to illuminate changes in b2b buying behaviour
A recent article in the McKinsey quarterly has highlighted a phenomenon that many of us have observed: B2B purchasing decisions are tracing increasingly complex...
Your customer’s buying process doesn’t have to be a mystery
It seems like a self-evident truth, doesn’t it? One of the consistently effective b2b sales strategies is to sell the way your customers want...
Think your salespeople have a closing problem? Think again…
I’ve lost count of the number of clients who call me in because they think their sales people have a problem closing new business...
What’s the one thing VCs love even more than growth?
Of course, every VC wants to see their portfolio companies grow. But as Scott Maxwell of OpenView Venture Partners points out in a persuasive...
Why your sales funnel needs to leak from the top, not the bottom
Let’s face it, every sales funnel leaks. It’s just that some seem to leak more than others - and many are leaking in all...
Don’t waste your time on deals that have no compelling reason to act
It’s often quoted, but worth repeating: the biggest single reason why B2B sales people lose seemingly well-qualified opportunities is because the prospect concluded they...
Never mind the marketing message, what about the sales conversation?
If your organisation has a complex sales process that requires a series of interactions over several months with a range of different stakeholders, there’s...
First line sales managers: at the heart of B2B sales success
I know many CEOs believe that hiring the best sales people is the recipe for sales success, and of course, they are partly right....
Sales conversation frameworks should be skeletons, not cages
You’ve probably observed a huge difference in conversational fluency between your most and least successful sales performers, and wished that you could bridge the...
Sales and Marketing alignment – necessary but not sufficient
>Most CEOs would like to see their sales and marketing teams working more effectively together. Many have “improving sales and marketing alignment” on their...