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Nicholas Kontopoulos

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Global CRM Business Development Director, SAP

168 points

Currently I am a Global Business Development director at SAP focusing on developing our CRM GTM strategies for Financial Services, Enterprise Mobility, Social Media, Customer Experience Management, Line of Business Sales and SAP Emerging Markets.

As a successful professional, I ...

Currently I am a Global Business Development director at SAP focusing on developing our CRM GTM strategies for Financial Services, Enterprise Mobility, Social Media, Customer Experience Management, Line of Business Sales and SAP Emerging Markets.

As a successful professional, I am very passionate about developing innovative GTM strategies, which break with the status quo and deliver customers fresh and creative solutions that create real competitive advantage.

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WEB: Mindgum blog

April 30, 2012

Nicholas Kontopoulos recommends this answer by Steve Woods

What is the succinct yet thorough definition of lead nurturing?

Great question and great answers so far. I would make it a succinct, but thorough definition in 3 parts (see more detailed description here: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2009/06/goals-of-lead-nurturing.html):
Lead nurturing is the discipline of:
1) Maintaining permission to stay in contact, through adding value
2) Establishing key ideas, perspectives, and viewpoints
3) ... more

Marketing Automation

March 8, 2012

Nicholas Kontopoulos is now following Dave Brock and 3 other people

Feb. 22, 2012

Nicholas Kontopoulos recommends this answer by Dave Brock

How do we master the challenge to transform people, processes, organizations from "push" to "pull"?

Tamara: Interesting question, I'll take a bit of a contrarian point of view, stating that Push is critical--but the Push that I'm speaking of is different than what most sales people execute.
Inappropriate "push" is what sales people do when they focus on pitching their ... more

Lead Management

Aug. 24, 2011

Nicholas Kontopoulos recommends this answer by Tamara Schenk

What are some of the best blogs on sales enablement?

Let's continue the list:
The Forrester Blog on Technology Sales Enablement covers a strategic and holistic view:
http://blogs.forrester.com/tech_sales_enablement
The IDC's sales advisory practice is also blogging on sales enablement:
http://blog.salesadvisorypractice.com/2011/02/better-sales-enablement-will-yi...
The Sirius Decision blog covers a broad range between sales and marketing alignment, contains also pure sales enablement blog posts:
http://blog.siriusdecisions.com/Blog/?Tag=Sales+Enablement
Sales ... more

Sales Enablement

Aug. 18, 2011

Nicholas Kontopoulos recommends this answer by Dave Brock

What do you do when you work for a company who's values aren't aligned with yours?

Great question, I think it's very difficult to work in a company that has values that are different from yours. Ultimately you will be unhappy, you won't be able to perform and the highest levels because you have no enthusiasm to do so. In fact ... more

Sales Management

July 9, 2011

Nicholas Kontopoulos and 8 other people answered this question

What is the state of the sales enablement movement?

I believe Tamara has once again artfully provided some excellent insights into this still fledgling strategy/discipline.
What’s your value proposition to sales?
A little while back I read an excellent post over at Customer Think which was titled “What’s your value proposition to the sales organization?” http://bit.ly/oEesUZ ... more

Content Marketing

Sales Enablement

May 12, 2011

Nicholas Kontopoulos recommends this comment by Bill Freedman

5 Common Mistakes with Sales Collateral (and How to Fix Them)

Printed sales collateral in the Internet/Web era and the print-on-demand era needs different thinking.
For my B2B clients in the tech industry, I can't recall the last time mass-produced collateral was part of the communication mix. Outside of business cards, presentation folders and give-aways, nothing ... more

Marketing Strategy

May 9, 2011

Nicholas Kontopoulos and 17 other people answered this question

Will the massive Amazon outage inhibit SaaS and cloud software sales?

Andrew, I agree with your above comment, but in a lot of cases the lack of IT knowledge within Lines of Business is often being exploited by tech vendors where the primary promise of cost reduction is being used as the main incentive. Which, in ... more

Information Technology

Cloud Computing

May 9, 2011

Nicholas Kontopoulos recommends this answer by Michael Brenner

What metrics do you recommend marketers use to track the success of their demand generation efforts?

The best way to measure the success of Demand Generation efforts is Revenue! This is the literal Value of the leads generated.
While Revenue may be difficult and there may be lots of great reasons why this can be challenging (systems, process, people), this should be ... more

Demand Generation

May 4, 2011

Nicholas Kontopoulos recommends this answer by Michael Fox

Sales Presentation Best Practices: What are your 3 tips for giving a successful sales presentation?

Don't just try to differentiate your product. Differentiate yourself, as a sales person. Frequently, when setting up a sales meeting, I will be asked if I will need a projector. There is an instant assumption that the meeting will be yet another sales person standing ... more

General Management

April 29, 2011

Nicholas Kontopoulos recommends this answer by Barbara Scott

Does your sales department really need a sales process? Why/why not?

1. Process allows for measurement
2. Measurement allows for management
3. Management allows for improvement
4. Improvement allows for increased sales
5. Increased sales supports profitability more

General Management

April 23, 2011

Nicholas Kontopoulos recommends this answer by Michael Schmier

One Of your Top Sales People Took A Walk and Took 3 Best Clients Along

I think Ken points to the biggest issue. I would never let a top client have a relationship with only one person at my company, unless my business model is such that there are high switching costs for a client. You can have all of ... more

Human Resources

Employee Retention

April 10, 2011

Nicholas Kontopoulos recommends this answer by Tamara Schenk

Do sales professionals need to also have project management skills? In what context?

Excellent responses already here, especially the deep insights from Mike Fox are very impressive!
I'd like to focus on the necessary project management skills especially in outcome selling scenarios – THE challenge for the technology industry!
Selling and realizing customer's business outcomes, that means a totally different ... more

Project Management

March 23, 2011

Nicholas Kontopoulos recommends this answer by Mike Boysen

Social CRM Best Practices: What are your 3 tips for developing a social CRM strategy?

1. Understand the business outcome your are trying to achieve
2. Determine how you will measure the outcome
3. Associate a value with that outcome
It's the same process you would use for the development of any strategy. We don't do CRM or Social CRM just because it's ... more

General Management

March 14, 2011

Nicholas Kontopoulos and 4 other people answered this question

What is an ideal split between time spent by sales people on marketing vis-a-vis sales activities?

I totally agree with Michael Fox’s post where he makes the point of the need for Marketing to spend some time in a client facing activities.
Having spent most of career in Sales, I can say there has been a few times when I wanted to ... more

March 13, 2011

Nicholas Kontopoulos and 1 other person answered this question

In your viewpoint, what is the major disconnect between business development and marketing?

Tamara,
I think you have provided some excellent food for thought in your response.
Personally, I have always seen Business Development as being a role that helps bring the various groups needed to drive long-term sales together.
I certainly agree that this is a very strategic ... more

General Management

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