Time is a valuable commodity in the world of business, especially for entrepreneurs. While business can change in an instant, there's one constant, solid thing, and that is time. The better you can learn to work with time, the better off your business will be in the long run. Here are four time management skills to help you maximize every minute of your workday.

Many large, multinational companies fail to reach and profit from middle-market customers. Yet the opportunity is enormous: In the U.S. alone, middle-market companies purchase more than $6 trillion a year in goods and services. Sellers with a big middle-market customer base can grow along with their clientele. The fundamental problem is that many multinationals don’t have a full-fledged strategy for selling to midsize companies, as they usually do for sales to enterprise and small business clients.

Some of my long-term problems had such simple solutions. If only I had thought of the obvious solutions first. For example: For decades, I could not drive for much longer than two to two and a half hours before my eyes would get so heavy that I risked falling asleep at the wheel. Day or night, year after year, all of our trips were based on how far I might have to drive. And then I discovered the solution. Sunglasses.

Sales leaders often default to a binary view when stratifying or tiering their customers, leading to the creation of two broad account categories — key accounts and “non-key” accounts. Many times, the “non-key” accounts are further stratified into sub-tiers focusing on different engagement strategies or resourcing models.

We’re in one of the most frustrating economies in recent memory. It’s not a full-on recession yet because, despite layoffs in tech, unemployment is generally low. But inflation is high, interest rates are high, and people aren't buying like they used to. And it's causing some serious sales slumps.

Do you want to make a positive difference in our world? It would be a dream come true to counter the anger and division that often surrounds us. As parents, there’s a way we can do it: by teaching empathy to kids. Teaching empathy to kids is as essential as teaching them to have good hygiene or nutrition.

The skills that can make you highly successful aren’t necessarily innate. You can practice them, and get better at them. That’s according to bestselling authors and leadership researchers Brené Brown and Simon Sinek, who sat down with Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant for a recent episode of his “ReThinking” podcast.

Brené Brown, bestselling author, researcher, and University of Houston professor, was surrounded by creativity as a child. “I grew up in a pink stucco house in New Orleans where my mom was always a maker. All the curtains in our house were homemade, and all the art in our house was from us kids. I had dresses that matched my mom’s that matched my dolls’.”

Einstein and Mozart were massively productive because they understood the value of easing back and chilling out. Modern theories of learning say that success is impossible without some degree of failure. Aim for the Goldilocks zone when setting a failure rate: roughly 16 percent.

As the pressure for sales teams to succeed increases, so too does the need for sales leaders to develop their sellers’ skills and potential. But there are a couple of problems preventing them from doing so. First, many sales leaders rely on an outdated sales leadership approach.

Today, there is hardly any more popular topic than artificial intelligence (AI) — its current capabilities, its future possibilities, its benefits and dangers. While AI will certainly be helpful and impactful, not even experts and scholars know what the “AI revolution” will look like ten or twenty years from now, nor when the true “year of AI transformation” will be.

A study of B2B companies found that just one in 20 was able to consistently grow sales faster than sales and marketing expenses. As companies seek to cut costs in an uncertain economy, increasing this commercial productivity is a smart strategy. Research shows the three ways companies can do this are to refine the go-to-market model, turn every rep into an A player, and make sales and marketing support more efficient.

Managers launching a new initiative often try to start big. They work to gain approval for a substantial budget, recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big “kick-off” meeting, then look to move fast, gain scale, and generate some quick wins. But starting with a big kickoff campaign is more likely to activate resistance than it is to win over a majority. It’s also unnecessary. Decades of research shows that you don’t need to convince everybody for an idea to take hold. In fact, a significant minority is completely sufficient to create change.

Did you know that May is Mental Health Awareness Month? Now is a good time for our professional community to raise awareness around mental health and wellness issues. When you do, you’re helping to support successful employees, workplaces, organizations and society at large.

In a previous article, we described a group of 71 leaders who were able to elevate their leadership effectiveness from the 23rd percentile to the 56th percentile — that is, from being poor leaders to good ones. While many readers were impressed that it could happen, many more were curious (and even doubtful) about how it could happen.

Few things can be more critical to your company's growth than your sales process. But when you step back to evaluate your team's methods, you may wonder whether your process is more of a hindrance than a help. After all, as important as traits like persistence and having good people skills can be in sales, they aren't going to be enough to create a winning process on their own.

I don’t know about you, but I’m relieved to see high-pressure sales tactics get dumped in the waste bin of history. The popular thinking used to be that the only way to succeed was to talk fast, instill fear, and constantly push for a close. None of that is conducive to a great experience for buyers OR for salespeople.

Sales leaders' roles will undergo significant changes due to the integration of AI in sales processes. AI is going to have a major impact on sales professionals and sales leaders need to increase their digital literacy and experimentation in using AI to modernize their organizations, not only will AI impact inside sales, direct sales and also customer service operations.

Persuasion is not a speech, it’s a process — a process of learning about your audience, earning their trust, and building a case that takes into account their interests. These skills are important in any situation, and essential in times of limited resources

A colleague and I were discussing if it was possible to recover from being seen as possessing a significant flaw in honesty and integrity. We identified various people who had tried to improve their honesty and integrity and seemed to make some progress, but for most people, this seemed to be a pit from which there was no escape.