As the business world evolves at lightning speed, shifts in B2B buying behavior have revealed a significant disconnect between what modern buyers expect and the ability of go-to-market (GTM) teams to meet these expectations. Consider today’s B2B buyers: They are savvier than ever, performing as much research as they can before talking with a sales rep. And even then, they prefer digital interactions.

In the ever-evolving realm of sales, the conventional pursuit of securing a "yes" may often lead to frustration and missed opportunities. This article focuses on the art of analyzing prospect responses and bringing a new meaning to sales success. You’ll learn why there's value in a "no" and how to reclassify a successful pitch with receiving an answer rather than just a "yes”.

Knowing how much revenue a potential client could generate is helpful when qualifying a sales opportunity. Knowing their sales potential lets you better assess if that company can afford your offer. If you're dealing with an existing client, understanding their total revenue potential can also help you better assess if there might be additional upsell potential. If you're in the market to buy a company, you might also want to estimate their sales.

In the world of sales, there is a time-tested secret weapon that has the power to make or break deals—the recommendation. A recommendation is a powerful tool that can have a significant impact on a customer's purchasing decision. It carries the weight of trust, credibility, and social proof, making it an invaluable asset for businesses looking to boost their sales.

Exceptional salespeople don't separate themselves from the pack by doing what everyone else is doing and hoping for the best. They go above and beyond, and you can't do that if you lean exclusively on conventional sales skills. No, the best reps demonstrate advanced sales skills — ones that can help frame you as an authoritative, helpful, empathetic guide with expertise relevant to your prospect's circumstances.

Selling often means speaking to people who've never heard of you. You might think of them as "cold leads," which is a bit impersonal. After all, they might very well become your best customers — in time. The problem is credibility. Without it, customers won't be receptive to your sales pitch. You can't blame their cynicism, either — the perils of overpromising in sales are well-known, even among the public.

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.