Successful salespeople possess many skills. They exude confidence in sales pitches, harbor the motivation to seek out and drive new business, and develop the knowledge to educate others about your company’s products and services. But the most essential skill of all may be emotional intelligence.

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.

In manufacturing, leaders devote a significant amount of time to operational efficiency, focusing on reducing waste, enhancing processes, and maximizing output. However, one critical piece is often overlooked: sales.

You can have the most efficient operation in the world, but growth will stall without a steady stream of new business and strong customer relationships. Sales should be treated with the same discipline and focus as operations. Sales must be built on process, data, and continuous improvement.

In January 2025, McKinsey & Company found that almost all companies are investing in AI, but only 1% believe they have reached maturity in using it meaningfully. That gap between adoption and impact captures the tension at the heart of leadership today: Automation can handle many tasks, but the human skills of persuasion, trust-building and narrative still decide who wins the deal.

AI may write the first draft, summarize the report or optimize workflow. But it can’t feel the room, tell a compelling story or crack open a narrative that connects to shared values. For entrepreneurs and executives, the mission is clear: Use AI to free capacity, not hollow your role.

We are living in turbulent times and there is no reason to expect that things will become less so in the future. During such moments our emotions become strained and pushed to their limits. Stress increases as emotions are stretched, making it increasingly important that we are able to recognize the effects of it in ourselves as well as others in our environment.

Becoming acutely aware of ourselves and others we are interacting with in this type of environment is paramount to building healthy relationships in the workplace and all areas of our lives. In my book, Emotional Intelligence Game Changers, I delve into how to navigate difficult times.

Have you ever missed a major deadline? Botched a massive product rollout? Lost a big sales account? We all make mistakes at work—and they’re sometimes major ones that can cost us professionally in the short term.

High-powered executives certainly aren’t perfect. According to a Harvard Business Review survey of 2,600 senior executives, nearly half, 45% experienced at least one career blowup. But mistakes, even big ones, are almost never career killers, experts say. For instance, some executives in the HBR study who admitted to making big mistakes eventually became top bosses.

Winston Churchill once said that “true genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.” He might as well have been describing today’s best teams. They aren’t waiting for perfect clarity, but are learning how to make confident calls in the fog.

Research from Harvard Business Review backs that up. A study by ghSMART found that the most successful leaders make decisions faster and with less complete information than their peers, and as a result are up to 12 times more likely to be high performing.

Not long ago, two colleagues and I found ourselves in an online meeting, cornered by three wildly overzealous sales professionals. They were selling a tool my company was evaluating, and their pitch behavior was so bizarrely unhinged, I half-expected Lorne Michaels to walk in and yell, "Cut! Great rehearsal, everyone!"

Imagine two colleagues and me, being bombarded with obvious, leading questions delivered with over-the-top enthusiasm from a group of aggressive salespeople whose sole aim was to get us to agree with them. They even demanded that we answer these leading questions out loud with an enthusiastic “Yes!”

Every founder loves a full pipeline. But what if many of those leads were never going to buy in the first place or were going to cause you more trouble than they were worth? Chasing unqualified leads is one of the most expensive mistakes businesses make. It drains your team’s time and fills your client roster with people who are a poor fit, leading to churn and frustration on both sides.

The temptation to go for volume is real, especially in the early stages when every inquiry feels like an opportunity, but failing to qualify enough can hold your business back more than you realize.

Of all the jobs that AI may replace more quickly than others, many experts have predicted that customer service might be one of the places this buzzy tech makes the deepest impact. Given the number of bots that pop up to offer help when you’re shopping online, you may well agree. But a new report from Gartner predicts something different. The experts at the analytics firm think that no Fortune 500 company will actually replace human agents completely by 2028.

If you’re a fashion model or a professional athlete, you’ll probably reach your professional peak before age 30. Research confirms genius wunderkinds in fields like math tend to reach the pinnacle of their careers early too. But how about leaders? At what age do leadership abilities peak? 

It’s a question that doesn’t lend itself to a clear answer. Sprint speeds are simple to measure, and we all have first-hand evidence of the toll time takes on our bodies. But leadership excellence requires a complex bundle of skills, including raw intellectual horsepower, emotional intelligence, wisdom, and accumulated experience. 

Let’s talk about the awkward truth most leadership books won’t touch with a ten-foot performance review: good managers fail all the time.

They fail not because they’re bad at their jobs, but because they confuse competency with leadership. They follow playbooks, hit KPIs, conduct polite one-on-ones, and yet. . . . their teams underperform, their top talent walks, and their culture flatlines.

Here’s the rub: being good is no longer good enough.

What is self-care?
Before you think about your answer, let me clarify: I’m specifically asking what self-care is—not how do you take care of yourself? It’s amazing that an entire industry has built up around self-care—but from what I have seen, few ever try to define self-care.

So what’s your answer?
Did your response sound anything like: exercise, being in nature, or boundary setting? If so, you have just named ways we practice self-care—and what they all have in common is that they support us in reactively and proactively managing stress in healthy ways. At its foundation, self-care is about stress management.

If you’ve been in sales for longer than five minutes, you know the old rules don’t hold up anymore. Cold outreach is colder than ever. Buyers are savvier. And the “show up and throw up” pitch approach is just a fast track to a closed tab.

Today, the best sales teams are shifting their energy— and fast. The secret isn’t just about more calls or better scripts but about smarter prep. Let’s unpack why sales prep is becoming the ultimate competitive edge and what that actually looks like behind the scenes.

Outgoing and upbeat by nature, sales professionals are often less likely than other members of an organization to show outward signs of strain when the going gets tough. But their leaders—certainly the best ones—know well that a “happy warrior” exterior doesn’t come close to telling the whole story of what sales team members are thinking and feeling.

Their leaders would do well not to forget this, especially in uncertain times like the ones we face today—when market signals are mixed and demand is changeable, when very little is going according to plan.

As someone who has coached several sales teams over the years, I’ve seen how traditional competitive sales environments run leaders down. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges of managing this particular group of personalities is that they’re extremely competitive. This competitiveness can be both a boon for your company (e.g. the sales will keep coming) and a burden for you (e.g. you’re trying to keep high-achievers from acting aggressively or impulsively).

I’ve seen top sales performers clash over territories and go to war with each other. Their sales manager then has to move from focusing on strategic leadership to constant conflict resolution.

Americans’ mental health is suffering and it’s not just due to stressful news feeds or not getting enough steps in. Toxic work environments are playing a large role in an epidemic of worsening mental health.

According to Monster’s newly released 2025 Mental Health in the Workplace survey of 1,100 workers, 80% of respondents described their workplace environment as toxic. The alarming statistic is an increase from 67% just a year ago

Most professionals spend years working toward a promotion. It is seen as the ultimate marker of progress, a clear sign that your efforts have been recognized. Yet for many employees, the moment of moving up does not feel like success. It feels like a setback. A promotion that is supposed to bring pride can instead bring exhaustion, isolation, or even regret.

The truth is that not every career step forward is designed with the individual in mind. Organizational needs often outweigh personal fit. When the two collide, what looks like opportunity can feel more like a punishment.

Along with much of her family, Phelps-Roper belonged to the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, a cult-like sect that spreads hateful messages about gay and transgender people. But in online conversations with her Words with Friends opponent, C.G., Phelps-Roper began to see the church through his eyes and recognize its cruelty, which led to still more questioning. “Little by little,” she wrote in her memoir, Unfollow, “my trust was eroding and withering.”

Contrary to what you see in pop culture, sales is all about building lasting relationships that create customers for life. Whether you’re just starting out or have been running your small business for years, the road to success can often feel like navigating an uncharted path. But here’s the good news: With the right map, you can make the journey smooth, predictable, and, most importantly, sustainable.
In this article, we’ll walk through the essential strategies every entrepreneur needs to win opportunities and build lasting, profitable customer relationships. Think of this as your sales blueprint — the guide for turning potential leads into loyal customers, while optimizing your time and efforts to focus on what truly matters.

There’s no question that B2B sales has always been an intensely competitive and high-pressure job. Competition is only intensifying, especially in the world of Saas. With the sudden rise of AI coding tools, like vibe-coding and GPT-5’s release, companies are debating the choice to build versus buy, while growing increasingly selective with what they choose to outsource. As a result, spending continues to slow, which means seller pressure is mounting.