Steve W. Martin teaches sales strategy at the USC Marshall School of Business. His latest book on sales linguistics is Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology: How to Penetrate the C-level Executive Suite and Convince Company Leaders to Buy.

Over the past decade, Martin interviewed thousands of top business-to-business salespeople who sell for some of the world's leading companies. He also administered personality tests to 1000 of them. My goal was to measure their five main personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and negative emotionality) to better understand the characteristics that separate them their peers.

His findings indicate key personality traits directly influence top performers' selling style and ultimately their success.

By all means full the article in HBR as well (link below). Here we discuss the main key personality attributes of top salespeople and their impact of their traits on their selling style. You may be totally surprised and realize you’re looking for the wrong type of person for sales… Read more...

ITdistri launches the first IT distribution guide in Maghreb...

The Maghreb guide is available in French or English as a 100-page PDF file from over 3500 IT resellers in the 3 main French-speaking Maghreb countries.

It has data on around 202 local and international distributors, semi-distributors, brokers, traders and VADs working in the region.

The guide is also available directly through ITdistri or its press partners.

"...Some vendors cover Maghreb only from foreign countries. But it is often difficult to identify the distributors. This guide Read more...

Best Buy might be better known for consumer sales, even if Best Buy for Business (BBFB) has been part of the B2B market for quite a while, selling peripherals and accessories-- and now it adds Dell to the business portfolio.

BBFB sells a number of major brands (including HP, Lenovo and Samsung) as well as products from enterprise vendors such as Wyse Technologies, NComputing, Lacie and Fujitsu. 

Why is a consumer product retailer pushing further towards enterprise? One has to keep in mind traditional retail is in trouble, and even Best Buy faces Read more...

Like many other companies, Amazon gives little details on the hardware running the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). But that didn't stop Accenture researcher Huan Liu from doing like Sherlock Holmes and offering an answer to at least one question-- the EC2 runs on around 454400 servers. 

Like the famous detective, Liu gathered his clues-- from the internet, in this case. Figuring out how many machines Amazon uses is difficult (to say the least!), due to the company's reliance on virtual computing. Which is why Liu used a few clever tricks to link all Amazon DNS and IP addresses to physical server racks, before assuming each rack carries 64 blade servers. 

He then checked Amazon data centre clusters by geography-- for instance, the biggest cluster at US East (Virginia) hosts around 5030 racks (or 321920 servers), while EU West (Ireland) is home to an estimate of 52096 servers. 

Amazon has 7 data centre clusters in total, spread across the US, Ireland, Japan, Singapore and Sao Paulo.  Read more...