You just had the call.

Twenty minutes of the prospect telling you what the incumbent got wrong. Late shipments. A rep who went missing. Invoices that needed a decoder ring. You are already thinking about how easy this will be. They asked for a proposal and because you are so confident, you send it.

You make 12 follow-up attempts over the next 4 weeks before reaching them. Then they say the sentence that ends this opportunity.

“We’re going to give them one more chance.”

One more chance. After they spent the first meeting building your case for you.

B2B buyers don’t need salespeople to just explain product features. They can find that information on their own. What they can’t get on their own is an insightful conversation with someone who understands their business, uncovers their challenges and helps them make better decisions.

That’s why consultative selling has become one of the most important capabilities sales organizations can develop. Learning and development (L&D) professionals play a critical role in making this happen.

This article was written by Ari Galper, an Entrepreneurs’ Organization member in Sydney. Galper is a best-selling author and leading authority on trust-based selling. He shares why the art of listening is a rare skill in today’s AI-centric world, and how you can build trust by improving your ability to truly hear your customers.

At the Fortuna One Summit in late September, I heard Steven Bartlett, host of The Diary of a CEO podcast, say something that stopped me in my tracks. Bartlett said his goal in business isn’t to outwork everyone, but instead to outlisten everyone.

Have you ever walked by an employee who you know in your heart is a nice person, but they don’t sound that way when they’re talking with a customer? Perhaps they sound a little aggressive, argumentative, or not professional? If you, as a colleague or boss, are noticing this, as a customer service consultant, trainer, and keynote speaker, I can assure you that your customers are noticing it too.

As an entrepreneur, should I start by exploring technology or training?

A few months ago, I was talking with a founder who had just spent $15,000 on a new CRM, a proposal automation platform and an AI email sequencing tool. She was six weeks in, and her pipeline was a mess. The automation was firing off messages she hadn’t fully reviewed, her CRM was logging activity but not helping her prioritize it, and she still didn’t know why good prospects were going quiet after the first call.

In B2B tech sales, closing a deal is rarely quick or simple.

On average, 11 people weigh in on a single purchase, and the process takes up to 11.5 months, with multiple touchpoints before the contract stage, as revealed in 6Sense’s 2024 Buyer Experience Report.

Between technical reviews, security checks, and strict procurement requirements, even the most promising deals can stall for weeks. And in that moment, it’s easy to reach for the one tactic that seems guaranteed to move things forward—discounting.

Most business owners think the sale of their business will fall apart over price. It rarely does. It falls apart because somewhere between the first offer and the closing table, an owner has a moment they never planned for, and they react instead of respond. The spreadsheet was never the problem. The nervous system was.

Selling a business you built is not just a financial transaction with a legal contract. It is an identity transition. And if you do not plan for the emotional part of the deal with the same rigor you plan for the financial part, your feelings will quietly rewrite the deal terms for you, one small concession at a time, until you look up and realize you gave away more than the numbers ever required.

Time spent in training is time spent not selling.

That’s a common sentiment among reps, and there’s a reason they feel that way. If they’re not see value in training, participating can feel like a direct cost to selling time. That mindset can undermine training, but it’s not the only barrier.

Training only changes behavior when you have capability, opportunity and motivation. Miss any one of these three, and the training won’t stick, no matter how well-designed the content is.

For the last decade-plus, marketing followed a simple, loud rule: broadcast. We pushed messages out, optimized for clicks and hoped our voice was convincing enough to persuade people to take the next step. News flash: That era is officially over.

We are at a massive turning point where the monologue of brand messaging is being replaced by sophisticated, two-way conversations driven by agentic AI. The most successful brands won’t be the ones with the loudest “microphones”. They’ll be the ones that are able to get their data foundations strong enough to create content that can interact with both humans and agents (more on that later).

For most sales professionals, AI has quickly become a necessary productivity tool, used for everything from prospect research to deal monitoring and post-discovery meeting scoring. The uses are far-reaching and continue to expand daily.

There is, however, a more valuable way to deploy AI if you are in sales. It doesn’t require new software, learning a new platform or some fancy integration with your CRM software.

You’ve built something remarkable. Whether you’re leading a growing team, developing innovative solutions or driving results in your industry, you’ve proven your expertise time and again. But here’s the challenge every successful professional faces: Being exceptional at what you do doesn’t automatically translate to being exceptional at selling what you do.

In today’s competitive landscape, your technical mastery, strategic insights and proven track record only get you so far. Ultimately, it’s your ability to connect those capabilities to what buyers truly value that determines whether opportunities turn into closed deals.

Thought leaders have been talking about AI’s potential to replace sellers for over two years. While I don’t have a crystal ball, I believe the more useful question is: What should sales teams be doing now that AI can generate outreach, conduct call preparation, offer feedback and flag a slipping deal in seconds?

To start, we must take a hard look at our current state—that widening distance between cheap information and scarce judgment, which I’ve watched play out at every level of complex B2B deals.

I’ve spent decades studying what separates the highest-performing go-to-market organizations from the rest. What I’m seeing in this AI moment is the same mistake leaders make in every hype cycle: they add new tools before challenging how the work gets done. They make broken processes move faster, confuse more activity with more value, and call it productivity. That is why so much AI investment in sales is creating activity, but not revenue.

The starting point for AI in sales cannot be adoption. It has to be output. Art Harding, GVP, GTM Strategy, Performance and AI Operations at ClickUp, offered one of the best definitions I’ve heard. He says it comes down to four levers: contract value, deal count, win rate, or cycle time.

The goal of customer service is to delight customers and make them so happy that they’ll continue doing business with you. However, some customers cause more aggravation than their business justifies.

When customers are toxic, they are not “always right,” and you have the right to refuse to do business with them. You’re better off turning your time and attention to reasonable customers. We’ll share 11 signs a customer isn’t worth keeping and highlight ways to break up with the wrong clients.

For most of the last two decades, the conversation about customer experience (CX) in the boardroom followed a predictable arc. Efficiency was always the theme: Where are we on volume and headcount? What do the cost-per-contact numbers look like? And the ultimate question: How do we handle more with less?

That framing made sense for a world where CX was a cost center by design. The function existed to absorb customer problems and close them efficiently. Success meant fewer escalations, shorter handle times and a deflection rate that trended upward every quarter. The teams who ran these operations were good at it. They optimized hard for exactly what they were asked to optimize.

Any time someone declares something dead, the reports of its demise are usually wildly exaggerated. We heard it about email, then the office, then the phone. Usually, the thing has not disappeared. It just stopped working the way people were used to.

Cold calling is different.

I started my career as an SDR, making those calls myself. Now I am the CEO receiving them. For the past few months, I have answered every unknown number that hits my phone.

Businesses today have access to a wealth of technology, data, and automation. AI can draft content, streamline workflows, analyze information, and help teams move quickly. I could not have imagined this level of digitization even a few years ago.

As a business owner, I love those advantages. We use technology every day to work more efficiently and better serve our clients.

The campaign goes live after weeks of work. It’s signed off, aligned, and there’s a buzz in the air about the business about to come your way.

You feel a quiet confidence as leads start to flow in. The funnel seems to be working, and the spend is justified. But cut to 48 hours later, and not one lead has converted into a sale. Was the creative not working? Was the call to action not strong enough?

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.