After their initial 90 days, your new sales reps likely feel ready to interact with buyers and lead sales calls. But ongoing training beyond this initial period is critical for their capacity to learn and improve. According to the Ebinghaus Learning Curve, tasks will require less time and resources the more they are performed. An employee takes time to learn to perform a certain task, and as they repeat it they learn to complete it quickly and more efficiently.

Even with staff that are capable of self-starting the learning process, no sales organization can afford to take sales training for granted — and it doesn’t stop when onboarding ends. When training is built to correlate with the sales process and pipeline, it makes a direct impact on results. To keep this training-results-training feedback loop flowing, we need to make training an ever-present practice with a culture of learning that permeates the organization through and through.

Dartmouth College’s Nailya Ordabayeva and two colleagues—Lisa Cavanaugh and Darren Dahl of the University of British Columbia—showed 300 NFL fans a description of a league-branded hoodie and either a one-star or a five-star review of it by a Cleveland Browns fan. The participants answered questions about their similarity to the reviewer and their interest in buying the garment.

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 disconnect is commonplace in many interactions between customers and service providers. In fact, these are prevalent complaints in many relationships.

According to research, when people adopt a self-distanced perspective while discussing a difficult event, they make better sense of their reactions, experience less emotional distress, and display fewer physiological signs of stress. In the long term, they also experience reduced reactivity when remembering the same problematic event weeks or months later, and they are less vulnerable to recurring thoughts (or rumination).

You’re guaranteed to make a few mistakes in your work life. Some of those mistakes are going to be big ones. You may do something that loses a client, puts a project behind schedule, angers a colleague, or costs your company money.

In Lead to Win, Carla Harris delivers a guidebook for modern leaders to be influential in any environment, especially this one. She’s widely known as a public speaker hired by companies like Amazon to motivate their organizations. During our interview she was a force of nature, leaning in to every question with a level of authenticity that was palpable.

It’s clear that workplace fatigue has been exacerbated by rising living costs and the ongoing energy crisis. On top of this, we’re now witnessing “quiet quitting,” a new viral trend in which employees “quietly” refuse to go above and beyond at work. Looking beyond The Great Resignation, we’re entering an era of “The Great Exhaustion” — with many British companies currently struggling to recruit and retain talent as a result.

According to Hubspot Research, only 3% of people consider sales reps to be trustworthy. If you want prospects to consider buying from you, first, you need to overcome that skepticism and win their trust. That’s where sales rapport comes in. Building sales rapport is an essential part of the outbound sales process. If prospects don’t believe you’re telling the truth about your product, they’ll never convert into buyers.

The soul-crushing experience of telling your sales manager that the deal you were so confident would close is now a no-decision is a bitter pill for sales reps to swallow. The opportunity that started off so positively and was looking like a win is now a ghost account that will not return calls or emails. As sales professionals, we rack our brains trying to figure out what we did wrong.

However, when the concept is introduced, it’s greeted with cold stares, heavy sighs and resistance. Whether the employees voice their concerns or keep them to themselves, they sound something like this: “I’m not a salesperson.” “I didn’t join this company to sell.” “I don’t want my customers to think I’m trying to sell them more.”

A survey by Bain and Google of 1,208 people at U.S. companies who are involved in buying software, cloud hosting, hardware, telecommunications, logistics, marketing, and industrial equipment revealed a set of misconceptions among sellers about how buyers behave. Sellers don’t realize that 90% of buyers choose a vendor that was on a short list at the beginning of the sales process; they focus too much on high-level decision-makers, underestimating the number of people inside the buying company who have influence; they rely too much on digital channels, neglecting physical selling; and they don’t realize how much the product demonstration factors into buyers’ decisions

It is gratifying to witness practical new research on a topic that has been around for centuries. Feedback is a topic one can constantly research, analyze, and implement new practices. Some of these new insights on feedback run contrary to prevailing beliefs. Others challenge bedrock assumptions that have grown up with the modern conceptions of organizations.

I recently moved to a new apartment, an occasion that calls for celebration—preferably outdoors in my brand-new backyard. But I didn’t expect how much being in a different space would disrupt my sense of safety. So I worried—about my cat escaping out the front door, how to protect my family from COVID, raccoon-transmitted diseases, and more.

One of the most telling signs that the U.S. is experiencing a burnout crisis may be the fact that Google searches for “burnout symptoms” hit an all-time high in May 2022, as we weathered the third year of the pandemic while facing the prospect of a faltering economy.

Traditions die hard. How else do you explain the outdated sales tactics still in use by sales professionals? Traditions are great for Thanksgiving and July 4th. But the trouble with traditions as sales professionals is that they prevent us from learning and implementing the required new skills. Consciously or unconsciously, sales professionals defer to outdated tactics that hinder performance.

A company that can’t sell can’t survive. I think we’ve all realized that in a market economy, sales are self-evidently good, like oxygen. So, it is hardly surprising for many years we have sent salespeople to a multitude of training programs in an effort to teach them how to sell more stuff.

There’s a lot of advice on how to be better at cold calling, but the best cold call tips focus on the conversation over metrics. Cold contact tends to put prospective customers on edge; the key to booking more meetings is to approach each call to make a genuine connection. As the world’s leading experts on sales development, we’re sharing our favorite cold calling methods, on-call best practices, and must-haves for effective cold calling.

Big changes are happening with B2B buyers. They are acting like B2C buyers. They want an Amazon-like buying experience, and they aren’t afraid to walk away from a purchase if they don’t get it. Traditional B2B selling practices are no longer effective with today’s digital buyers. If companies in that space want to compete, their sales teams need to take a hard look at their systems and processes.

Strategy should be a creative exercise but companies frequently end up with plans that look very much like their previous ones. Strategy expert Graham Kenny describes a three step process for avoiding this trap: 1) open your mind to ideas from external stakeholders, 2) take a cold, hard look at where your performance is failing, and 3) study companies in other industries that have solved these problems.