The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how salespeople interact with customers and with business-to-business (B2B) organizations. Organizations must confront the shifts in how their salespeople operate. Recent research recommends firms develop an adaptive sales force to address disruptions like a pandemic and be prepared to meet such challenges in the future. Based on interviews with marketing and sales executives, we explore how firms have responded to these interconnected changes during the COVID-19 pandemic and offer insight into best practices deployed across industries.

Unlike companies or products, individuals possess intrinsic personal branding as a result of personality qualities, past experience and development, and communication with others-whether they know it or not. In this sense, every person already has a personal brand of some kind. The challenge is to manage that brand strategically. We offer a process for doing so, beginning with self-analysis. Then we review published sources and summarize interviews about the personal brands of 33 U.S. and European sales executives and managers, salesforce members, and professionals who sell their own services. The interviews indicate roughly equal emphasis on competence and personal qualities in creating personal brands, as well as significant interest in distinctiveness, and the respondents provide a range of examples of how personal branding pays off. This investigation leads to our basic recommendation: Follow a strategic self-branding process based on one's values and competencies, similar to the branding methods of companies and products, but with the understanding that personal branding will change as one's career advances.

This article, based on work with dozens of Business-to-Business firms, extracts general principles of brand architecture design based on specific examples, and then tests these principles by applying them more broadly to a wide sample of brand architectures. B2B brand architecture is a function of two key dimensions: the organizational structure, in particular, the extent to which a firm is centralized or decentralized (in terms of its product range, sales, and marketing); and the extent to which the firm's market offerings are standardized versus customized. This framework and the axiom of risk alleviation through the sales process together capture the principal elements of B2B brand architecture design.