Today’s business leaders must navigate ever-changing conditions—economic uncertainty, geopolitical instability, and a lingering pandemic. Meanwhile, the same leaders are working to optimize business efficiency. Much has been written about business efficiency and how much, fast, and well a company can produce a product or service vs. the time, effort, and resources.

Objections are unavoidable on sales calls, but encountering one doesn’t necessarily mean an end to the conversation. If you’re able to anticipate what your prospect’s objections will be, you stand a better chance of overcoming them. At Trellus, their AI sales coach detects objections, provides real-time suggestions to guide reps during the call, and measures the effectiveness of those suggestions based on different metrics.

Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, service robot technology has been on the rise in the past few years. Self-service automated kiosks are here to stay, and robots are the future of customer service. service robots must be designed and implemented the right way, otherwise customers — and human coworkers — will avoid interacting with them. Robot technology should not simply be added as a novelty, but carefully integrated to deliver value to customers and support employees — maintaining a balance between automation and human interaction.

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.

If you can’t remember the last time you apologized: congratulations, you are perfect — or at least you believe you are. For the rest of us, apologizing is a common, if difficult, part of life. Among the earliest lessons imparted to children is the art of saying sorry, yet these skills don’t always transfer neatly to adulthood. Relationships are messy and both parties often have some level of culpability. However, the biggest obstacle to apologetic bliss isn’t a complicated argument — it’s self-protective motivations.

Let’s face it, you won’t see eye-to-eye with everyone you work with — no matter how hard you try. From co-workers to bosses, there are probably more than a few people who you consider to be difficult.

And we’re all the “difficult person” in at least one other person’s story, says Marc Lesser, a Zen teacher and executive coach with clients like Google and Facebook, and CEO of consulting company, ZBA Associates.

Credibility is an increasingly valuable attribute today. Perhaps to no one’s surprise, the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer found a rise in polarization, with the U.S. falling in the top quarter of countries deemed “severely polarized.” But business bucks that trend. Edelman’s research found that business is now not only the most trusted institution but also the only one trusted globally. In addition, the research found that respondents overwhelmingly expect CEOs to use their resources to “hold divisive forces accountable,” according to the report’s press release.

Mental health is a topic of critical importance and front of mind for so many of us. My series on mental health has generated comments, ideas and recommendations—and it’s worth considering all the ways the collective thinking about mental health will shape responses from leaders and organizations.

Hundreds of readers shared in comments on LinkedIn and other social media about the pressures they feel as leaders, the risk of burnout, and how best to support themselves and their teams during difficult times.

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’.

For my entire life, I’ve struggled with anxiety, insomnia, and obsessive worries about things I can and can’t control. My friends chide me as the most paranoid risk-taker they know. Sometimes it helps me, but sometimes it absolutely doesn’t. When I’m facing a big moment, I can become absolutely paralyzed and completely unproductive. My body rebels, putting my success at risk simply because my brain won’t shut off and let me get rest. It’s a fight-or-flight response, a constant need to be at high alert—to look for danger.

Ask 100 leadership experts what the most important leadership skill is for the new hybrid workplace and you may get responses like listening, vulnerability, emotional intelligence, humility, coaching, etc. There have been many studies and articles with solid reasoning for developing all of those soft skills in leaders. But many of these abilities are based on one truly important attribute that accelerates our growth in most aspects of life: Self-awareness.

When you’re in the middle of a difficult conversation, it’s common to focus solely on yourself: your ideas, your viewpoint, and your feelings. But a “me-centric” approach can backfire. To achieve your goal, you need to think beyond yourself. While crafting your message, you must keep the other person’s feelings and opinions in mind, too. To do so, avoid these common mistakes: don’t assume your viewpoint is obvious; don’t exaggerate; don’t challenge someone’s character or integrity; don’t blame others for your feelings; don’t tell others what they should do; and don’t say “It’s not personal.”

If you've ever had the privilege to work for a good leader, you've probably noticed that they have their people's best interests in mind. In other words, they genuinely care about the success of their people -- including their career goals and aspirations. It is counterintuitive for most bosses to naturally gravitate toward caring and serving the needs of others due to competing demands, including pressures to meet their own performance expectations.

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.