Lifting up both individuals and teams and recognizing emotions builds stronger communities, more trust, and helps people feel cared for. With the environment continuing to feel uncertain, engaging employees in this way is more important than ever. While calls to reduce burnout, implement systemic fixes, and increase retention mount, managers in any industry can implement the authors’ 10 strategies immediately to listen deeply for emotions, reflect that understanding, and provide appreciation, connection, and community. These tactics can be used in both in-person and virtual environments, on a regular basis or as needed, in whichever order works for your team.

“It’s a fact that the ability to influence and persuade others is simply not a ‘nice to have’ anymore,” says Steve Martin, faculty director of behavioral science at Columbia University’s School of Business and CEO of Influence at Work. Martin is also the author of several New York Times bestsellers, including Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don't and Why. In his LinkedIn Learning course, The 10 Essentials of Influence and Persuasion, Martin shares insights on how you can improve your ability to influence and persuade others. And influencing and persuading others is what sales is all about.

One of the best ways to set your sales team up for success is to create an action plan. Instead of simply assigning target sales goals and leaving them at that, an action plan reverse engineers how your team will reach those numbers, laying out the best tactics and strategies. This post will walk you through four steps to create an action plan to improve sales performance, along with sales action plan ideas and tips to keep your team on track to achieving the target.

Let's start by defining strategy. There are competing views on what strategy is and how to achieve it. In my opinion, to put it simply, strategy is the determination of an organization's primary long-term goals and objectives, the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary to achieve those goals. There are two equally important perspectives to strategic planning: the mechanistic logical method and the dynamic human-centered approach.

The economy is slowing, and hundreds of layoff announcements are in the news, including Goldman Sachs (3,200), Pratt & Whitney (900), United Furniture Industries (2,700), and Meta (11,000). If you’re a B2B seller and your customers are cutting costs, what should you do?

With many organizations, we are seeing sales force reductions that parallel the layoff announcements. At others, we see sales force hiring freezes. And every sales organization is rethinking its strategy and scale.

Have you ever walked into a store, told the salesperson what your requirements were, and they pointed you in the direction of the solution that answered your needs? Congratulations! You’ve just been “solution-sold.” Solution selling gained traction in the 1980s and has been popular ever since. Though the Harvard Business Review prematurely declared it dead a decade ago, today’s top sellers have found new ways to leverage solution selling that speak directly to the attitudes and needs of modern buyers.

Most salespeople spend only a third of their time selling. While the exact number ranges between 27% and 36%, depending on the survey, the message is clear: Sales reps spend the bulk of their day on activities that don’t directly generate revenue for your company.

Two-thirds of your sellers’ time is spent doing manual tasks, including record keeping, data entry, lead management, searching for sales collateral and content, and tool management.

With the New Year just around the corner, it’s time to consider the new B2B sales strategies you may have been putting off. The B2B landscape is changing rapidly. New technology and changing economic environment are forcing companies to change plans. To stay ahead of the curve, sales leaders must adapt or fall behind. This article explores the 2023 sales landscape and how sales leaders can position their teams for greater success.

There is nothing more exciting, or more dangerous, than a sales professional who can attack the game of selling with the strategic mind of a golfer. I am a lifer in sales who, somewhere along the way, fell in love with golf. These may seem like two unconnected occurrences in anyone’s life, but with time I realized that there are too many similarities between the game of golf and the game of sales to ignore.

Essentially, sales onboarding is defined by activities like inducting, training, upskilling, and providing resources to new hires to perform well as fast as possible. A key metric sales managers can use to assess sales rep performance as a result of onboarding is the new sales rep’s time to first sale. The other critical measures of the exercise are achieving ideal sales behaviors and being able to especially engage with smart customers successfully.

Customer satisfaction is at its lowest point in the past two decades. Companies must focus on 10 areas of the customer experience to improve satisfaction without sacrificing revenue. The authors base their findings on research at the ACSI — analyzing millions of customer data points — and research that we conducted for The Reign of the Customer: Customer-Centric Approaches to Improving Customer Satisfaction.

There’s no better feeling than positive feedback for your business. When a customer leaves a great review or emails to tell you how much they love the product, it’s a great morale boost for the entire team–but does that happiness actually translate into more sales? Customer satisfaction is a great starting point, but it’s not enough to turn someone into an advocate for your business.

An occupational hazard of being a psychologist is that I watch people a lot. I’m also a vice provost at UT Austin and, as we reach the end of the fall semester, there are a lot of holiday parties that I attend at work. I’ve noticed that a lot of people who go to these parties find a few others they know and engage in conversations. But others seem to be great connectors: They engage with many of the people in attendance, generate conversations, and make them feel welcome.

You would be amazed at how many people go into a negotiation without any pre-planning regarding their strategy. These folks go in hoping they'll land the maximum price, and they'll jump in, and use their gut and intuition to reach their goal. I'm sure some people have had success approaching negotiations this way. Typically, the better-prepared party wins in a negotiation.

Most companies analyze financial performance by looking at geographic segments, product lines, or channels. These perspectives overlook the fact that aggregate revenues are dependent on individual customers, and that’s why analyzing the business by looking at its customers can provide managers with useful insights. This process, called a customer-base audit, can be a tool for businesses as they seek to answer five questions.

What is at the heart of being a successful salesperson? The answer is simple: meeting the needs and wants of the other person at their level. The "how" is the important part. In many cases, salespeople get a bad rap. And the number one reason most people state for not liking salespeople is that they push their agenda without listening to, acknowledging or meeting the needs and wants of the consumer.

This is a real question and answer from Teaching Startup, where members (startup leaders) ask questions about building and growing their business, and the answers are published in a members-only newsletter so that all members can benefit.

Another sales kickoff season is upon us, and for the first time since 2019, these annual sales events are like kickoffs from pre-pandemic days. But not quite. The virus hasn’t gone away, sales teams are dispersed around the globe, and remote work is here to stay.

If you could tell your exact buyer motives, you'd have no problem tailoring an effective sales strategy to suit their interests and inclinations. If you could always understand your buyer's motivations, you'd never lose out on a deal. Even though you cannot read people’s minds, there are still ways to get a feel for the underlying buying motives that drive most purchases.

Like it or not, we’re already in Q4. For me, that means doubling down on my efforts to lead my team to meet our sales goals for the year. And I’m not the only one. This is when leaders focus on how their organization can gain the competitive edge and drive performance in this final stretch of the year. That’s why I advise my colleagues to go back to the basics.