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.
Understanding B2B Buying Behaviour
In any high-value complex B2B sales environments involving new projects with multiple stakeholders, the buying behaviours and motivations that drive your customer’s decision-making journey are…
Avoiding the Value-Added Trap
An earlier version of this article was first published in the November 2019 edition of Top Sales Magazine.Every sales organisation likes to believe that what…
Sales people need to act like personal trainers, not bartenders
In a recent article for the CEB, Andrew Kent posed the question “Are your reps bartenders or personal trainers?” It’s a great question, a wonderful…
Assumptions kill opportunities
I’ve had the opportunity to sit in on a number of QBRs with my clients, and as an outside observer I’m struck by how common…
The why, how, what and who of sales checklists
When Harvard Medical School Professor (and BBC Reith Lecturer) Atul Gawande published his “Checklist Manifesto” nearly 10 years ago, it soon became apparent that the…
Sales perfection is impossible!
There are so many potential variables and unknowns in any complex B2B sales environment that the idea of running a completely perfect sales campaign feels…
Please tell me something I don’t already know
Corporate Visions recently hosted a webinar on how to gain access to business executives. Their findings were based on a series of realistic simulations intended…
The most important thing a proposal needs to sell
When your salespeople submit a proposal, it should always represent the natural culmination of a series of value creating conversations with their potential customer.The contents…
RFPs: how to avoid being column fodder
The term “cannon fodder” is used as a somewhat dismissive description for soldiers who were regarded by their generals as expendable and were forced to…
Helping your customer make sense of complexity
Making a buying decision has never been more complicated. Your customers have access to an overwhelming amount of information - often inconsistent, and frequently false…
A fresh perspective on the Challenger Sale research
First published in 2011, “The Challenger Sale” must be one of the most widely-read sales books of the past decade, and with good reason. Together…
Who are your ideal customers?
Most sales organisations - and most of the sales people who work for them - are capable of describing their target market in broad demographic…
Why are so many CRM implementations still failing?
According to many market analysts, the market for CRM solutions shows no signs of slowing down. It’s increasingly rare to find established sales organisations of…
How likely is your customer to take action?
One of the most significant mistakes any sales person can make is to assume that their prospective customer is inevitably going to buy something, and…
How does your CRM manage different opportunity types?
Why do so many CRM implementations behave as if every sales opportunity was created equal? If your organisation is involved in B2B or transactional B2C…
The Foundations of Sales Effectiveness
I recently recorded a second wide-ranging podcast on the foundations of sales effectiveness with Michael Webb of Sales Performance Consultants Inc. We continued to develop the…
Up-front agreements: the key to having productive customer conversations
Business executives often report that they look back on the initial conversations they have with sales people and regard them as a frustrating waste of…
Stop striving for sales perfection!
Given the inevitable complications and unique considerations involved in any complex sales environment, it’s hard to imagine that we could ever execute a completely “perfect”…
What is your Customer’s Minimum Viable Problem?
The concept of a Minimum Viable Product is common in the start-up community. It is normally regarded as an initial release of a product that…
The Art, Science + Engineering of Sales Management
Here's an edited transcript of our conversation: Michael Webb: This is Michael Webb, and this is the Sales Process Excellence Podcast. Some people focus on…