Salesloft is trying to make salespeople's jobs easier with the help of AI. The sales engagement platform is incorporating IBM's Watsonx artificial intelligence into its interface to enhance seller capabilities, the Atlanta-based Inc. 5000 company shared in a press release. IBM's technology offers a "prompt lab" that can summarize meetings or reports, generate insights and takeaways from content like product reviews, and create a customer assistant through a chatbot template.

Within your organization, you may have noticed that top performers are meticulous planners. They understand that success doesn’t happen by chance and, as a result, they spend time at the beginning of the sales process preparing a well-thought-out strategy for “planning to win.” In our previous article, we explored the importance of understanding what matters most to your customer’s key stakeholders, and the types of questions that can help you discover and align their objectives and challenges with your solutions and unique business value.

In November of last year, I spoke at the CX NXT - Customer Experience Summit in Dubai on the topic of failure, fumbles, and fiascos in customer experience. Now, we can all learn from failures, but rather than just doing a talk about service and experience mishaps and what we can learn from them specifically, I wanted to try and elevate the discussion to illustrate that failure is inherent in every organizational system and is something that we need to both acknowledge and do something about.

It's that time of the year when many people are thinking hard about how to be better. Either to be new and improved or to work smarter, if not harder. For salespeople, that means focusing on what has been—and will likely remain—the biggest challenge: not just keeping their clients, but finding new ones. I wrote will likely remain because of one trend in particular. Salespeople must find new ways of remaining vital, as I've written here before.

Empathy is a key concept in business today, especially in sales management. Some would say it has become a buzzword, but many experts agree that empathetic leadership enhances sales team motivation and performance in big ways. I suggest there is an element of truth in both views. The challenge is in the execution. Many sales managers have the wrong idea of what empathy really entails.

Losing customers without any plan to mitigate the situation is a surefire path to ensure your business goes under. If you’re seeing a decline in customers, there could be various reasons for why that’s the case, like poor customer service, inconsistent pricing, or lack of training for your sales reps. Digging into why you’re losing customers doesn’t need to be a big mystery to solve. However, understanding why you might be losing customers is essential so you can create and implement a plan to recover and retain your clients.

What do sales leaders look for when hiring a salesperson? To find out, we asked sales leaders at some of the most innovative companies in the world – Gong, LinkedIn, IBM, Salesforce, Equifax, and others – that exact question via our How I Sell newsletter. And interestingly, there was a lot of overlap in their answers. Many of the respondents used the same words over and over again.

Customers can be unforgiving in the marketplace with lots of competition across industries, that’s why it’s imperative as a business owner to make sure you are providing a memorable experience. Award-winning speaker, author, and skills trainer Patricia Fripp once said, "It's not your customer's job to remember you; it's your obligation and responsibility to make sure they don't have the chance to forget you."

Have you ever searched for an item on Amazon and you not only found the item you were looking for, but found around 100 variations of the same product. They appear to be the exact same thing but since there is a huge difference in price, you look closely and learn that the cheapest products are Chinese rip-offs that don’t work, don’t last, and don’t include the same features.

As part of my financial planning business, I offer free introductory meetings. Recently, a potential client indicated in her pre-meeting questionnaire that she would like to have two times her current salary in retirement. To avoid boring you with math, let me just say that this is fairly impossible in most situations. For a basic example, if you earn $100,000 per year and want to have $200,000 in retirement you would need to have approximately $5 million invested, which is fairly difficult to accumulate using a $100,000 salary.

As we step into 2024, the landscape of sales is evolving rapidly, shaped by technological advancements, shifting consumer behaviors, and the ever-changing business environment. Let's delve into the key sales trends that are set to define the year ahead, drawing insights from various research papers and my own observations.

Sales has always been a dynamic and evolving field. As we move further into 2024, we are seeing a continuation of this trend, with fresh methodologies, technologies, and strategies emerging at an unprecedented pace. Here, I delve into some of the most impactful sales trends of 2024 that are reshaping the way we connect, engage, and drive growth.

I first learned about the importance of this from the father of a woman I was dating. This woman was special, and I knew I wanted to marry her. First, I had to make it through the difficult conversation with her father. Fortunately, he gave his permission, along with some advice. He told me, "You need to learn to read her mind." When I replied I wasn't a mind reader, he repeated his advice but didn't elaborate.

Discussion of generative AI has maintained a fever pitch since OpenAI released ChatGPT-3.5 in late 2022. Many leaders’ instinct is to provide direction and codification when trying to drive adoption of new tools. This is particularly true in sales, a function rooted in processes, playbooks, scripts, and templates. However, driving adoption of generative AI as a new way of working — leading sellers toward creative use of generative AI, and helping them to use it as a coaching and learning aid — requires a very different approach. The author offers four steps to get you started.

One of the most fruitful (and enjoyable) things you can do is to prioritize being in relationships with people you enjoy. Even if none of them are or work directly with your target clients, they each represent hundreds, if not thousands, of people they know. And chances are, people within their network are, or work with, your ideal clients.

What are customer needs? Answering that question may not always be easy – but it’s crucial for business success. After all, knowing what the customer wants is the starting point for creating winning products and services. Just as importantly, it’s the basis for forming long-lasting relationships. The State of the Connected Customer report reveals that 62% of customers expect businesses to anticipate their needs, and 73% expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.

In the age of social media, it’s not hard to picture what an engaged customer looks like. They’re the superfans liking and commenting on every post a brand puts out there. You know the ones; Apple, Disney, Starbucks, American Girl Dolls (for those of you with kids of a certain age), and so on. They’ve built a passionate base of engaged customers who’ll talk your ear off, online and in real life, about every ‘exciting’ new thing.

It is easy to get caught up in the importance of sales when you are running a business. After all, sales are the lifeblood of any business. However, the truth is that there are many other factors that contribute to the success of a business. Increasing sales is probably high on your list of priorities. But, if you want to build a successful business, there is another critical area that you cannot afford to ignore – financial management.

In managing customer relationships — or relationships with any key stakeholders — it is critical to manage the balance of power between the company and any one customer. This can be done by diversifying the customer base, understanding (and be willing to use) customer pressure points, and (in the case where a company is locked into a single key relationship) ensuring that the customer is as dependent on the company as the company is dependent on the customer.

According to data from Objective Management Group (OMG), which has assessed more than 2.4 million salespeople, 95% of the very best salespeople emphasize listening over talking, but more than half of the worst salespeople take the opposite approach, emphasizing talking over listening. While the primary skill to prioritize listening is asking good, timely questions, only 28% of all salespeople ask enough questions. Even worse, that drops to just 4% of the worst salespeople.