Like many in the learning business, it’s likely you’ve spent the past several years adapting your sales enablement approach toward meeting the needs of an increasingly remote and, in some cases, highly distributed workforce. And, while the COVID-19 pandemic challenged each of us to redirect learners to new forms of enablement, it also provided a unique opportunity to view existing training methods in a new light and to reassess what has worked and what hasn’t for our learners.

Why the real key to success in this business is being a chameleon. Lately, it seems as if I've been inundated with requests for advice. Whether it be from Gen Z newcomers to the world of sales or veterans looking to hone their skills, I've been approached repeatedly by people who somehow think I know better. As good as this feels, it also makes me want to reassess what I share with those seeking counsel. And it makes me especially sensitive to the advice those same people might be getting from a Google search.

Successful businesses focus on three core principles of their customer experience: They put the digital experience in the business context. They recognize that customers are not created equal. And they make zero-based decisions. Continuous improvement is fine, but it’s important to be willing to think from first principles, and to re-examine and justify what you are doing and what you could do differently. This helps ensure that the digital roadmap is prioritized and focused on the highest impact actions.

Rejection is part of the job in sales. That is the absolute truth. 90% of the time you’ll get a “no.” What people need to realize is that success and failure are on the same exact road. They’re not that different from one another. When you hear a no, that doesn’t mean that you have failed. When a door is closed for you, that doesn’t mean it has closed forever.

In today's changing economic landscape, businesses need solutions that can boost productivity while saving time and cutting costs. As customer expectations continue to evolve, sales teams in particular need to do more with less. The pressure is on to close more deals and meet sales targets today. But at the same time, sales teams also need to identify opportunities for tomorrow. Tiffani Bova, Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce, calls this dual challenge the ‘seller’s dilemma’.

Until recently, coaching was considered primarily a one-on-one practice. But no matter how effective employees are on their own, they can only contribute to the real power of the collective if their managers provide them with coaching as a group. In this practice, which the authors call team coaching, a leader’s role is to support the team as an organic unit, providing guidance, setting routines and practices, and creating constant opportunities for group learning. In this article, the authors describe three of the tools and techniques of team coaching that they’ve found to be the most important for fostering accelerated learning and successful outcomes.

Schools probably don’t do this anymore, but when I was in elementary school (GenX-er here), we were taught how to use the telephone. The telephone company donated a dozen rotary phones, and we paired up to practice how to answer the phone, take a message, call a neighbor, and call 911. It was a room full of 8-year-olds running through call scripts like pint-sized sales reps. Then we had to do the role-playing exercises in front of the entire class (!), and the teacher critiqued and graded us.

Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan apologized for over 15,000 canceled flights over the winter holidays. "I am extremely sorry. There's just no way to apologize enough. …The storm had an impact, but we had impacts beyond the storm," Jordan said in a letter. Despite the airline's stellar record in customer service, the jury is still out on the effectiveness of his recovery response, even after giving each impacted Southwest passenger 25,000 frequent flyer points. But Southwest did a lot correct in their attempt to regain betrayed passenger trust.

First, let’s look at several reasons why sales managers struggle to impact the overall organization:

Successful sales professionals are often turned into sales managers without leadership development or ongoing guidance. Additionally, hiring practices are often not conducted in a way that creates success.

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.