The days of buyers relying on sales reps for product information are long gone. Buyers are savvier than ever and have shifted to digital channels to research solutions. In fact, TrustRadius’ 2022 report, B2B Buying Disconnect: The Age of the Self-Serve Buyer, revealed that virtually 100% of buyers want to self-serve all or part of the buying journey. Because of that shift, traditional enablement no longer works. Enablement functions that focus only on sellers are missing a massive opportunity.

In the dynamic and data-driven corporate world, effective communication is paramount, and one of the key tools for this communication is corporate presentations. Corporate presentations are the perfect way to communicate ideas, proposals, and facts to your business's internal audience as well as external stakeholders. In fact, over 35 million PowerPoint presentations are given daily to more than 500 million people.

The Great Rationalization has arrived, and buyers are more risk-averse than they’ve been in a long time. One effect of selling in a more challenging economic environment? Having to make your pitch to larger buying committees that include skeptical, budget-conscious executives. It’s a challenge facing almost every B2B enterprise seller – and it’s a challenge we’re here to help you address.

Maximizing profit and growth should be a top priority for businesses, along with client care. But profit cannot be achieved in your business without making sales. Sales are the lifeblood of a business, and without revenue, your business crumbles. Many business owners fall into the trap of thinking that a lack of sales means a money problem. While yes, not meeting your sales targets will turn into a money problem, I most often see small business owners not knowing how much needs to be sold each month to keep their business afloat.

Before disregarding your likability and attributing any personality defects as something your coworkers just need to deal with, it’s essential to recognize the invisible impact these skills have on your overall performance. Your ability to effectively communicate with others extends beyond solving your own problems. Your proficiency in listening builds trust and establishes integrity. Your friendships inspire others to reach higher and stretch alongside you.

After a vacation, it can be tempting to double down on work in an attempt to make up for “lost” time, or to try to hurry through the time it takes to get back up to speed. Other times, the urge to overwork stems from a well-meaning effort to relieve team members of the extra work they were covering for you, or a desire to demonstrate that even though you were away, your commitment remains high and you’re still valuable to the organization. Whatever the motivation behind post-vacation overwork, it can leave you boomeranging from one extreme to the other, which increases stress and actually undermines your efforts to catch up.

Team and group leadership skill is the next development frontier. Does your team feel inspired and uplifted with you as their leader? Ask them. Engage in a 360-degree feedback process so you can learn about how your team perceives you. Then fix the stuff that doesn’t work for them. Make changes that matter. How strong are you at clarifying roles? How swiftly and compassionately do you offer needed feedback?

As much as it’s your role to set the pace for the team, that can be harder to do for yourself. It is very easy to feel overwhelmed in leadership roles because of the demanding deadlines, the people problems that fill up your day, the second-guessing and criticism, the pressures to do more with less, and dealing with the crisis of the moment. Work can become a three-shift day the morning emails, taking care of problems at work all day, and then the night shift to catch up on reading and writing and responding to more emails.

As buyers, we know how much the digital-first world has transformed buying behavior. It isn’t just the volume of choice. It’s unrestricted access to seller information, without actually having to rely on the seller for it. This has put B2B sellers in quite a tough spot. Now, sellers have an even smaller window and shorter opportunity to make an impact on their prospects.

In any sales engagement, the groundwork before the call can be decisive. Chris Brewer, Co-founder at OMG Commerce, shares his pre-call preparation strategy, primarily for inbound lead generation, with insights adaptable to outbound leads. Chris sees Google as more than a search engine; it’s a vital tool in his research arsenal. By Googling a brand, he uncovers essential information like legal issues or consumer dissatisfaction. This helps him anticipate red flags that might surface during the call.

Succeeding in sales isn’t just about learning how to get someone to buy what you’re selling. Success also requires a strong sense of resilience. Specifically, resilience in the face of frequent rejection. But how? Most non-sales folks avoid rejection at all costs. The best sellers, meanwhile, must embrace rejection, as a stepping stone to their goals.

Warren Buffett, Ginni Rometty, and Howard Schultz share a common background — they all worked as salespeople before becoming CEOs of Berkshire Hathaway, IBM, and Starbucks, respectively. Buffett worked as an investment salesman, Rometty got his start in a sales role at IBM, and Schultz had a stint as a salesman for Xerox. Each serves as proof that salespeople make excellent business leaders.

BMW is one of the world’s most recognizable brands, the maker of “the ultimate driving machine.” While Ford became famous for the moving assembly line and Toyota for its participatory work methods, the German firm usually made the headlines thanks to technical breakthroughs. Over the years, BMW’s legendary engineering prowess yielded innovations.

Leadership performance is under threat. Many leaders assume that leadership development is a reward rather than an intentional, structured plan to move them through a growth process in support of their continuous improvement on their leadership journey. There are also leaders who assume that excellent financial performance equals excellent leadership performance. For these leaders, the end result justifies the means.

n the dynamic and data-driven corporate world, effective communication is paramount, and one of the key tools for this communication is corporate presentations. Corporate presentations are the perfect way to communicate ideas, proposals, and facts to your business's internal audience as well as external stakeholders. In fact, over 35 million PowerPoint presentations are given daily to more than 500 million people.

What makes someone a growth leader? In conversations we’ve had with business leaders, the answer tends to boil down to a variation of “I know it when I see it.” But it turns out that there is a specific set of attributes that growth leaders share. After carrying out a survey of 165 C-suite executives and senior vice presidents with growth responsibilities and conducting in-depth interviews with 20 executives, we found that growth leaders have seven specific beliefs and behaviors.

It was July 2020—the middle of COVID Year 1—and the temperature had hit 95 degrees (F). Then, the AC on my beloved 2003 Toyota Highlander died. The cost to repair it was far more than the value of the automobile. I needed to buy a new car. But we were in the middle of the pandemic. Shopping for a car the “traditional” way was out of the picture. So, I did what every buyer was doing when shopping those days. I fired up my MacBook, launched Google Search, and started researching my purchase.

Raising others up is a hallmark of a great leader. Beyond simply being a kind thing to do, developing talent is paramount in achieving notable scale as a global organization. This article will outline nine principles that I think about as a sales leader. Feel free to lean on this list or develop one that aligns with your core organizational values.

Sellers have got to work harder than ever. That’s because buyers are more informed than ever before. Buyers conduct a lot of their own research, which means they’re more than 50% along the sales journey before us sellers get in touch. The challenge for us is helping buyers make sense of what they’ve read online, but without knowing what they’ve been reading up on.

When salespeople lose a deal, most prefer to move on rather than linger over the specifics of the loss. Similarly, when they win a deal, most are quick to celebrate. But very few take the time to assess why they won the business. In the authors’ experience leading and coaching sales teams, they see evidence that a brief, well-pointed sales retrospective, where you unpack the reasons behind a win or a loss, can significantly improve a team’s future win rate.