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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Sales teams have been trying to achieve two impossible goals at the same time: build meaningful connections on one hand, and scale to handle a ton of accounts on the other hand. It’s been near impossible. Thankfully, AI agents have arrived to help. Below, I’m sharing 20 sales statistics that show how.

Most of the sales statistics below come from our fresh 2026 State of Sales report. They reveal how most sales teams are still growing revenue despite the challenges like changing customer demands.

AI work is advancing at a pace that’s rewriting the rules of business. What once took entire teams can now be automated in weeks with intelligent agents that learn, adapt, and scale in real time.

At Salesforce, we can now embed intelligent agents into new or existing workflows in a matter of weeks, automating tasks that once demanded entire teams. These agents operate in real time, learn from every interaction, and move seamlessly across systems with a level of precision and adaptability

I’m beginning by going off topic but I will pivot back to selling and specifically, converting leads to business.

When you post on LinkedIn, should you go with a short, one-paragraph teaser, a long multi-paragraph thought piece, or a video? Or maybe even a carousel?

The answer isn’t one-size-fits-all—it’s nuanced and depends on your situation. If you run a blog or publish LinkedIn articles regularly, your approach differs from someone whose primary (or only) platform is the quick LinkedIn post.