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.
Why your pipeline doesn’t need any sales stages
This is a subject I’ve referred to before, but an excellent article by Don Mulhern has prompted me to promote a concept that deserves far…
The illusion of the expert buyer
One of the most dangerous mistakes we can make as sales people is believing that our customer – and particularly the sponsor we have been…
When your customers DO want to speak to a sales person
There’s been a great deal of comment – often from people and organisations who frankly should know better – about how today’s B2B customer doesn’t…
The keys to engaging our stakeholders
Our prospective customers are far more likely to want to engage with us if they believe that they are likely to learn something valuable from…
Why early engagement is critical to sales success
The now increasingly discredited BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe) approach to opportunity qualification discouraged sales people from pursuing opportunities unless there was a clearly…
Sales pipeline management: let’s stop confusing progress with probability
Sales forecasting is hard. For proof, you need look no further than the 2018 CSO Insights Sales Performance study, which reported that on average a…
8 steps to positioning your strategic business value
In complex B2B sales environments - particularly ones that involve multiple stakeholders and lengthy and often complicated buying journeys - it's unwise to rush to…
Targeting your most valuable sales opportunities
Many B2B sales and marketing organisations have an unfortunate habit of wasting huge amounts of time and energy pursuing "prospects" that are unlikely to ever…
4 key factors influencing B2B buying behaviour
In any high-value complex B2B sales environment involving new projects with multiple stakeholders, the buying behaviours and motivations that drive your customer’s decision-making journey are…
Sales enablement and the performance gap
The primary goal of sales enablement must surely be to increase sales effectiveness by progressively reducing the performance gap between our best sales people and…
Is your BDRs’ outreach pertinent or impertinent?
If you are in a role that tends to attract the attention of other vendors’ business development people, you’ve probably had them reaching out to…
The non-linear world of B2B buying
It’s falsely comforting to think of selling as a process in which one step follows logically after another. But although rigidly defined processes might be…
In complex B2B sales, stakeholders have more than one dimension
In complex B2B sales, there’s a common recognition that multiple stakeholders are almost always involved in the decision-making process. Research by the CEB (now part…
Responding to, Reframing or Creating Sales Opportunities?
Jim Burns of Avitage drew the distinction between finding versus creating sales opportunities in an article on LinkedIn a couple of years back (I’ve included…
Avoiding the curse of premature elaboration
Apparently, someone once offered a definition for the split second as “the time between a customer giving the merest hint that they might have a…
The 7 storytelling secrets of successful salespeople
I’ve long believed that top sellers are storytellers. They are able to call upon a rich fund of relevant anecdotes that they use to communicate…
The Problem with Account Plans…
Many of the clients I’ve been working with over the past few months have been attempting to implement some form of account planning. Far fewer…
Asking good questions isn’t enough…
Most traditional sales methodologies stress the importance of asking good questions, and there’s no doubt that the ability to ask relevant and effective questions is…
Of course it matters whether you won or lost…
You’ve probably heard some variation of the saying “it matters not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game”. The modern use…
B2B Sales: Contrast Drives Change
Many analysts claim - and many sales people would agree - that today’s most powerful competitor is not another similar vendor, but the status quo.…