Every business has been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic in one way or another. Employees getting sick, a rapid shift to remote work, labor shortages, and supply chain issues are just a few of the challenges companies have dealt with these last two years.

Just as businesses have changed, so must sales. If you're not making changes in your sales processes, you're probably leaving money on the table.

Once seen as secondary to in-person sales, the e-commerce channel has rocketed to the forefront since 2020 and is now a key purchasing gateway for many corporate buyers.

Despite this, misconceptions abound, with a number of B2B companies telling us that “customers aren’t ready” and “e-commerce is an immature space for businesses like ours.”

These days, top salespeople know to speak the language of their clients. If your client is a straight-shooting, direct communicator (think New York stereotype), you can be equally direct with them. If your client is reserved (think Midwest farmer’s daughter), direct communication can be intimidating. While it can be tough enough speaking with one buyer and understanding their style, today’s challenges and uncertainty make buyers extra cautious.

Enter 2022 and we will have B2B marketers witnessing a range of technology trends. The overarching principle driving these changes is that the customer demands a lot more. The growing competition and race for profitability amidst the pandemic have put the customer in the driving seat. The old paradigm of leading the customer is gradually being phased out, favoring a new one — follow the customers and cater to their requirements.

Whether you call them New Year’s resolutions or goals, many of us are setting action items to help us improve in 2022. Scrolling through LinkedIn recently, I saw several sales leaders sharing their goals. One common theme: They want to empower their sales teams to succeed.

My articles begin with analogies so we'll start by asking, has baseball changed?

Games take longer, there is role specialization, starting pitchers rarely complete games, hitters are stronger, pitchers routinely throw in the mid 90's and there is a trend towards either hitting a home run or striking out. But it's still baseball. It is still played the same way. The changes are superficial.

It seems after four decades of talk about the “consultative” or “solution” sales approach, companies would be adept at selling this way by now. Unfortunately, that’s not the case: Many sales professionals struggle to move beyond pitching their products or services to providing solutions that are connected to customer business outcomes.

As many of us continue to work from home, it’s natural to form new habits and mindsets to navigate a new way of working. While some of these behaviors may feel helpful in the moment, they may not serve you well as we consider life post-pandemic.

The amount of product and service information available to B2B customers—reports, blogs, display ads, email marketing, and more—has become overwhelming, leading to indecision and a sharply reduced likelihood of making a substantive purchase.

The best reps have turned this conundrum into a prime selling opportunity. Above all else, they help buyers make sense of the information they’ve encountered. Their approach is a form of sensemaking, and it encompasses three broad activities.

Your sales team is the backbone of your business. I can imagine that you’d like to increase their sales revenue consistently month by month. With sales coaching you can tangibly improve your sales team’s output with focused goals you’d like to achieve. At Predictable Revenue, we believe it’s one of the most valuable investments you can make in your business.

"Embrace customer complaints" is probably a cringe-worthy idea to some of you. The thought of negative feedback may trigger something inside of you that frankly, makes you want to crumble up all the papers on your desk or just throw your laptop against the wall. Wait, please, help is on the way.

At my company, we LOVE to get negative feedback. It's rare and candidly, if there was a lot, maybe my team wouldn't embrace it as much. My company is able to do well even though we don't have a gold standard service method like The Ritz-Carlton hotel or follow ten core values like Zappos.

Receiving a request for proposal (RFP) can be a great opportunity to grow your business.

But, for a lot of business owners, RFPs are complicated, overwhelming, and downright terrifying.

In this article, we’ll give you 11 practical tips to improve your business proposal writing skills and show you exactly what to do the next time an RFP lands in your inbox.

When they say that "the customer is always right", they might just have a point.

In Singapore, a survey conducted by U.S.-based experience management company has revealed that offering poor customer service experiences can lose businesses a crazy amount of revenue – to the tune of US$11 billion per year, in fact.

I surveyed 53 sales managers, asking them (among other things) what essential skills their top-performing salespeople possess. Okay, it wasn’t an actual survey.

However, our team at Sales Readiness Group (SRG) recently completed rolling out a sales training program from a large sales organization, and I was reviewing my notes from interviews with frontline sales managers as part of the customization process.

There is no doubt that coaching is an effective tool for developing people and teams. Research shows that training and coaching can lead to an 88% increase in productivity, versus 23% from training alone, and an organization’s return on investment (ROI) in training increases from 22% to 88% when supported with coaching. The question is, how do you use coaching in your organization to really make a difference?

From time to time, I help clients recruit for key roles. Unlike recruiters, I don't work on a contingency because I take responsibility for the entire recruiting process from soup to nuts and then the client makes the decisions on who to hire. They pay a fee for services. I specify the requirements, write the job postings, attract and source candidates, take the initial application, get them through Objective Management Group's (OMG) accurate and predictive candidate assessments, review resumes, conduct the first interview and then recommend candidates who are perfect fits for the roles.

According to our 2020-21 Sales Performance Study, only 53% of salespeople are achieving their quota. The reason it’s so tough to sell? It’s harder than ever for sellers to please buyers. And most sellers aren’t approaching buyers in the right way, which means they’re facing more challenges than ever as they try to make a sale.

With the last 18 months changing the sales landscape in ways no-one could have predicted, it’s time to pause and think about the future. A successful sales organisation needs a defined vision, a skilled team, and an obsession with the customer.

Pre-pandemic sales people used personal contact (a firm handshake, wining and dining, etc.) to build customer relationships. Now that it looks likely we'll be living with some form of Covid for the next few years (and maybe forever), a winning face-to-face personality will get you absolutely nowhere. Ditto with the "I'm successful so you should buy from me" personal semiotics, like the tailored suit and the Rolex.

One of the biggest challenges for a sales organization is moving upmarket. For example, if an organization targets the small- and medium-sized business market (SMB) and now want to target enterprise customers — that’s where the money is — they need to rethink how their representatives sell.