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.

The customer is not always right. We are all customers, and sometimes we are dead wrong. Stew Leonard, Jr., CEO of Stew Leonard’s Grocery Stores, enjoys saying, “The goal is to make the customer feel right.” His sentiment means never dealing with a customer in a judgmental way, because you never want a customer to leave feeling unvalued. But what are ways to let the customer know they are wrong without making them feel wronged? Advice on interpersonal tactics is readily available—listen, let them vent, be empathetic, etc. But what are guiding principles? Here are four.

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?

How to create an AI-Ready Sales Culture

I’ve spent the last two decades as an entrepreneur, and I’m going to let you in on a secret: You don’t have to sacrifice customer service to scale.

As businesses grow, there is a natural push toward automation, efficiency and cost-cutting — often at the expense of a personalized, human touch. I’ve seen it firsthand. Early in my career, I was working my way up the corporate ladder at an internet service provider when our majority stakeholder decided to outsource operations to improve the bottom line. I watched the lively culture and collaborative office environment we’d built slowly dissolve, replaced by teams halfway across the world who faced language barriers, cultural disconnects and limited engagement.

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.

Here are some phrases and words that will rub most customers the wrong way, and what your employees should be saying instead.

We’ve all experienced customer service that didn’t live up to our expectations. Unsatisfactory experiences are universal and negatively impact our lives—a bad customer experience (CX) can sour your mood or your whole day. Yet a good one can quickly turn it around. Whether it’s the friendly local barista or the head of a software company, positive experiences can spark enduring customer relationships for years to come.

That’s where human customer service comes in. Human customer service is about creating support experiences that are personalized, understanding, and efficient to build trust and loyalty with your customer base.

You can’t grow your business without increasing sales, whether by attracting new customers or getting satisfied customers to return. Sometimes, though, it might seem like you’re already doing everything you can to drive sales and aren’t getting results. If you’re stuck in such a cycle, it may be time to rethink your current approach — this guide will help you do just that.

Your current customers are your best bet to increase sales. After all, they’ve already used your products or services at least once before. So, it stands to reason they may need them again. If you stay in touch with these customers and provide the right incentives, it’s likely they’ll come back to buy from you in the future.