We’re nearing the end of the “hurry up and wait” era when customers politely settled for service and timeliness that suited the providers but sucked for the recipients. In many cases, there were few alternatives, and they were grateful to have access at all to certain of these providers. However, in today’s competitive environment, “right now” is barely enough to satisfy the demands of an educated, aggressive and increasingly connected public. No one wants to wait for anything, and if you’re not willing to meet their requirements, they’ll happily find someone else who will. The whole world is a few clicks away.

Most founders struggling with growth think they have a lead generation problem. They focus on lead volume or other top-of-funnel gaps, such as the cost of acquiring those leads. In my experience, the real issue shows up later. You expect a deal to move forward, but it doesn’t. It stalls, drags, quietly dies.

When you dig into why, the answer is rarely “you didn’t have enough features” or “you were too expensive.” It’s much simpler. The buyer didn’t feel confident enough to move forward. I’ve seen this hold true for all types of business, from B2B companies with large sales teams or software and other goods that are sold directly online.

When I started selling, most sales jobs were straight commission. You ate what you killed. You were paid what you were worth. Sales attracted the kind of people who were hungry, money motivated, and focused on results.

Compare that to the state of commissions in 2026. More and more companies have moved towards either a very generous base salary with a small commission percentage and/or bonus, or straight salary. Today, sales attracts a different kind of individual, one who would rather babysit accounts, accept orders, and simply be part of a big, well-known company, not because they can make a lot of money, but for bragging rights about the logo they work for.

If you’re a CEO or a VP of HR, you can usually spot an executive coaching candidate before they realize it for themselves. From your vantage point, you get to see things that may be invisible to the executive living inside their own day-to-day world, like attrition patterns, succession bench depth, who’s getting promoted on other teams and who's carrying more workload than they should be.

The hard part isn’t seeing the signs. Rather, it’s knowing when the signs add up to a candidate for executive leadership coaching compared with a training problem, a performance problem or just a leader having a rough quarter.

Last month, a CEO announced that his institution would replace "low-value human capital" with artificial intelligence. The backlash was swift—public outrage, union condemnation, regulatory scrutiny, and an apology that landed as badly as the original comment. He joins a growing list of CEOs who simply cannot get their AI messaging right.

But this isn't really a messaging problem. It's an emotional-intelligence problem. As any brilliant influencer or speech writer will tell you, the key to successful or influential communication is heart—being able to speak in a way that resonates with your audience.

A few years ago, a group of researchers and I were tasked with answering that question. In addition to identifying what makes a great team, we worked to isolate the skills needed to build and maintain such a team, and outline ways to develop those skills.

I recently shared these discoveries with members of the Lighthouse, my community for emotionally intelligent leaders, and the conversation revealed practical lessons for anyone who’s trying to get more out of their team.

Now that Q1 results are in, it's a good time to step back and ask a fundamental question: is your sales force the right size?

Last Month we conducted a webinar on territory management. Let’s say you have allocated your territories in such that you expect each salesperson has a reasonable opportunity to bring in $2 million in revenue for the year. After Q1, you notice that some reps are tracking well above their $2M targets. This would cause you to wonder if there are unrealized opportunities in some of your territories.

Don’t you just love being stuck on hold while a recording insists, “Your call is important to us?” Or getting a “just for you” product recommendation that totally misses the mark? These moments highlight how impersonal the digital customer experience has become. What if artificial intelligence (AI) could move past robotic platitudes to read a customer’s tone, frustration, or satisfaction in real time? Can it go beyond solving problems to truly understanding how someone feels?

We’re not there yet, but the technology is advancing fast, and the stakes are high.

If you’re like most learning and development (L&D) leaders, your sales onboarding goal is to create knowledgeable and trusted advisors who can start closing as quickly as possible. You want sellers who use a consultative approach to build long-lasting and profitable customer relationships.

But many sales onboarding programs make a common mistake: They spend weeks on product training before introducing sales skills. This produces very knowledgeable sellers who can’t run a good discovery call.

It used to be that you had to wait for the morning newspaper or an evening TV broadcast to get the news. An event had to be especially noteworthy to be pushed out as a “breaking” piece that would get communicated shortly after it occurred.

Now more than ever, the world runs on instant information — and not just for headline-grabbing events. AI is rapidly reshaping how businesses obtain and react to the breaking news that can directly impact their bottom lines, even when that information wouldn’t be considered newsworthy to others.

For decades, organizations have treated learning and skills development as something that supports work but stays separate from it. Whether it’s a course to complete, a session to attend or a program to roll out, it traditionally happens in isolated moments, disconnected from the work itself.

This model is fundamentally broken, built for a world where skills had long shelf lives and change moved slowly enough to train for in advance. But it no longer reflects how people build skills today.

Strong leadership includes the courage to address what needs attention. Many leaders want their teams to grow, but delay the conversations that would bring greater clarity and strengthen accountability. Over time, that silence can leave people unsure of what is expected and unsure of how to improve.

Learning how to give feedback to employees helps leaders create clarity, strengthen trust, and reinforce healthy standards across the team. When feedback is handled well, it supports individual growth and gives accountability a clearer, steadier place in the team’s culture.

The art of storytelling can catapult your visibility, confidence and authenticity. It can build the transparency that generates trust and bridge the gap to build real connection.

I worked for a decade as a negotiator in the media industry, and even in the most complex deals, it was the ability to tell the right story in the right way that made all the difference.

Often, when negotiations go awry, it’s because emotions are flared, egos are bruised and preconceived ideas take center stage.

When asked about brand loyalty by eMarketer in 2025, almost two-thirds of survey participants said customer loyalty was on the decline. However, there’s an antidote to this phenomenon: building emotional connections with your buyers.

A shopper who has multiple positive experiences with your people, products, or services is more likely to come back. Plus, there’s a higher chance they’ll gush about your brand online, which can influence future purchases.

‘’For the past 25 years all I have been doing is selling. Selling products, selling services, selling businesses, selling myself. Sometimes I have been manipulative. And sometimes I’ve sold things I’ve had such passion for I sold it cheap just because I wanted the message out about what I was selling.

And often, it was very much in the middle: I needed to sell something because I had to pay my bills. Maybe I was a little desperate, a little hopeful, a little scared, and I wanted to make sure my family got fed.

High-pressure situations at work, like an important meeting, are often the backdrop for our most reactive professional moments. In 2025 nearly two-thirds (60%) of employees who spent more than 15 hours a week in meetings reported experiencing severe stress levels, according to a Wiley Workplace Intelligence report.

When conflict arises, our bodies often react before our brains. You might lose your temper, lose your words, or find yourself anxiously agreeing to something that you don’t actually have capacity to do. It can feel deeply frustrating, and even shameful, when your responses feel impulsive and out of your control.

The idea of work-life balance has been around for decades, but today the combination of rising financial pressures, gig-work, cobbling together of part-time jobs, and (for white-collar workers) nonstop digital contact, flexible schedules, and remote work can make it difficult for many of us to ever truly “switch off.”

For some families, long hours are a necessity. But for others, the pressure to keep working can be rooted in a sense of obligation—to be ever more successful, maintain a certain lifestyle, or simply keep up with expectations shaped by a consumeristic and highly individualistic culture.

When K’ai Roberts Fu stopped trying to sleep eight hours in a row, her nights got dramatically better.

For years, Roberts Fu, a speaker and author (her book, 12 Mis-Steps, launches May 19), had been waking naturally after three or four hours of sleep, lying awake for an hour, and then drifting off for another stretch. She told herself she was bad at sleeping. She worried. Which, predictably, made sleeping harder.

Successful salespeople possess many skills. They exude confidence in sales pitches, are motivated to seek out and drive new business, and develop the knowledge to educate prospects about their company’s products and services. But the most valuable skill of all may be their emotional intelligence, also known as EQ.

Closing high-level sales involves emotionally connecting with customers. Creating genuine connections means understanding and harnessing your own emotions as well as your prospects’ and customers’ emotions. These skills embody emotional intelligence. We’ll explain more about emotional intelligence, why it matters in sales, and how to cultivate it in yourself or your sales team.

Roughly 56% of product searches still begin on Amazon, reflecting how firmly commerce habits have been shaped over the past two decades. In my experience, brands have built entire strategies around that reality, investing in search optimization, marketplace visibility, and performance marketing to meet consumers at the point of intent. For a long time, that system rewarded those who understood how to capture demand efficiently.