Nicholas Kontopoulos

SAP

As part of SAP Global CRM Solution Marketing team Nicholas is responsible for developing the SAP go-to-market strategy for Line of Business Sales and Enterprise Mobility for Sales, Service and Marketing. Nicholas has over 20 years of experience working across a broad range of Industry Verticals in primarily Sales and Business development roles. Prior to joining SAP Nicholas worked as a Sales Management Director within The Capita Group who are the United Kingdom’s market leader in providing Business Process Outsourcing services.

Enterprise Mobility: unplug your 21st- century Sales Warriors

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Posted on 2012-05-08

Does anyone else remember what life was like as a salesperson before smartphones? I do, and it wasn’t pretty. In 1998, I covered a pretty big territory, including all of England and Scotland. I would regularly drive 400 to 500 miles a day, and after each appointment, I’d be frantically pulling out maps, organizing my notes and trying to make phone calls to keep things moving. Of course, details would inevitably get lost in the shuffle, and there was always this sense of bouncing around and never having complete control over my time. No matter how much I planned in advance, it couldn’t make up for the fact that I was disconnected.

When technologies like the Compaq iPAQ came along, we thought we had it pretty good, but that mobile experience pales in comparison with today’s widespread wireless coverage, ability to access corporate applications and fast download rates.

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21st Century Sales Warrior = People + Process + Technology

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Posted on 2012-04-10

Throughout my sales career, I grew increasingly frustrated by the perspective that sales people were not like other professionals -- accountants, engineers, designers, marketers – and that instead they were viewed as lone wolves, undisciplined rebels who functioned independently of the rest of the organization.

On the contrary, I believe that any of my own success in sales was rooted in behaviors that these other professionals also engaged in, namely, harnessing the collective genius of the communities in which I operated, developing and applying best practices and intelligently exploiting available technologies that were available to me. In other words, I succeeded because I harnessed the power of bringing people, process and technology together.

This is even more important in today’s post-downturn world, in which closing a sale is no longer a matter of just showing up at the sales call. Sales people today contend with an increasingly global marketplace, an ever-...

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Empowering the 21st Century Sales Warrior

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Posted on 2012-02-17

I am passionate about fusing innovative business processes with technology. I have to be: that’s the only way the sales warriors of the 21st century can win.

Think about it: Sales has become a very complex activity in the 21st century. More competitors, both local and foreign, are battling for the same deals. Buying centers are enlarging; decision makers and influencers are spread across geographies. Increasingly, your sales teams are pitching an ever-expanding range of products and services to a customer base that is more well-informed than at any time in history.

All this complexity translates into huge volumes of information that your sales representatives need to consume—about products, about customer needs, about the strengths and weaknesses of competitive offerings, and more. There’s information on LinkedIn, in notes on a smartphone, in a CRM system halfway around the world, in half a dozen blogs, and more. Always more.

Assuming you want your sales...

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