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.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere in sales enablement. Nearly every platform now includes it, often with bold claims about transformation and impact. Some of those claims are justified. Many are not.

Regardless, there is no doubt that AI will play a role in sales enablement. The real question is, where will it add the most value? While it is tempting to sprinkle AI fairy dust on everything, organizations need to be careful not to automate the very behaviors that make sales professionals effective. The opportunity is real, but so is the risk.

In a world that rewards speed, scale, and certainty, the most transformative leaders share one foundational quality that doesn't show up on any balance sheet.

I've been in leadership development long enough to know that most organizations don't have a courage problem — they have a naming problem. We dress it up in strategy decks and OKRs, we talk about innovation and disruption, but we rarely say the quiet part out loud: real transformation requires the willingness to be uncomfortable, be wrong, and sometimes be alone in your conviction. That willingness has a name. It's courage, and it has to come first.

When I was in sixth grade, I used to torture myself with a particular hypothetical I’d heard someone pose: Would you rather live a shorter but happy, carefree life or a longer life that wasn’t quite so easy?
I’d twist myself into knots over something like this. The instinct is to say the happy one. Who wants to be unhappy? Trading longevity for happiness seemed like a lopsided bargain.

Then again, I’d run around and take the other side of the argument: What if unhappiness had its own value? What if worrying about things actually made you do things — useful things, meaningful things — that a carefree person wouldn’t bother with?

For small business owners juggling multiple responsibilities, finding a simple yet effective time management system can mean the difference between burning out and building momentum. The Pomodoro Technique offers exactly that: a structured approach to work that helps you maintain focus, avoid burnout and actually get things done. Whether you’re a solopreneur writing proposals, managing a remote team, or running a bustling retail operation, understanding how to implement this time-tested method can revolutionize your workday. We’ll show you not just what the Pomodoro Technique is, but how to adapt it for your specific business needs, roll it out to your team and measure its impact on your bottom line.

Price has long been treated as the ultimate lever in business: raise it and risk losing customers, cut promotions and sacrifice margin. But that simple equation misses a deeper shift in how people actually make buying decisions.

McKinsey calls it a ‘decoupling’ – even though 74% of us say we want to save money, we’re still splurging on dinners and tech. It turns out price only explains about 60-90% of why we buy, and the same vibes between brand and the customer also warrant clients’ engagement.

You invested in AI for your sales organization—tools, licenses, manager training, and a clear message to the field that this would change how they sell.

Six months later, progress is uneven. Pilots haven’t scaled. AI in sales shows up mostly in admin, not deals. Pipeline quality looks familiar.

What happened?