“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.

Emotional maturity is the number one most important thing in relationships, the number one skill set we can work on to get great ones, and the number one most important thing to a happy and effective life. Contrary to some misconceptions, emotional maturity is not about “self-mastery,” or self-development. Mature people may pursue these, but they have nothing to do with emotional maturity.

Gallup’s 2022 Exceptional Workplace Award winners, selected for having exceptionally high employee engagement levels, have a few things in common. A notable one is that they use their organizational culture and values to guide business decisions. “Leaders at these exceptional workplaces relied on their culture and organizational values when making decisions that affected their people. Employees, in turn, saw the organization’s values lived out through decisions, which builds trust in leadership,” according to Gallup.

As we enter 2023, it's clear that we are entering an altered business paradigm driven as much by new technology represented by electric vehicles and the metaverse as it is by anachronistic conflicts such as the one instigated by the Russian Federation. The global recession, ongoing war in Ukraine and increased credit rates have all presented new challenges for businesses looking to grow. However, it's important to remember that adversity can also present opportunities for growth and innovation.

Great leaders tend to follow a set of principles that guide the way they work, organize their thoughts and plans, and lead their teams. Call it a platform, a policy, or a belief system, but most leaders have a foundational awareness of what they need to perform at their best. My own guiding principles stem from my strong belief in servant leadership, my background, and my need for establishing a balance between family and career.

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.

The past few years have created renewed awareness of the importance of employee development and overall employee experience. Senior leaders are looking to learning and development (L&D) to guide skills development, skills data, upskilling, reskilling, and mobility, to meet the needs of their ever-changing business environments. A Redthread report indicates that L&D has established itself as an enablement partner in strategic discussions and organizational culture change.

As we enter 2023, the future of work has become the now of work. Many of the changes which started during the pandemic were accelerated and have become permanent aspects of our working lives. Just as I have done in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, here is my countdown of what you should include on your HR roadmap for 2023.

Every leadership role has its own complicated features – there’s nuance and variance to every company, team, and managerial role. But no matter who you’re supervising, what goals you’re hitting, and what kind of impression you want to make, UPenn has a 15-part leadership checklist that everyone can learn from. Here, we’ll break down what these tools mean and how to implement them regularly.

How can certain leaders successfully lead their company to emerge triumphant out of a major crisis, when others do the exact opposite and bring it to the ground? What makes them different? Alan Mulally is the former CEO of Ford Motor Company where he led Ford’s transformation into becoming one of the world’s leading automobile brands in the United States. Prior to serving at Ford, Alan was the CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Boeing Information, Space, and Defense Systems.

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.

Are you procrastinating? I am. I have been delaying writing this article for the last few days even though I knew I had a deadline. I have scrolled through social media, and I have gone down a rabbit hole looking up houses on Rightmove—even though I do not need a new house. I have also re-watched the video “Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator” by Tim Urban, one of the best TED Talks I have seen. I found it especially comforting to learn that even pigeons procrastinate.

Growing up, my Indian immigrant parents instilled in me an incredibly strong work ethic. My father would always say, “Keep your head down, work hard, and you will be recognized.” Unfortunately, that advice has not always served me well in my career in corporate America. While I was working hard, I wasn’t managing up. I kept my head down working and working some more, busy trying to make an impact.