Last week, I posted an article on the Impact of Relationship Building Challenges in Sales. The article explored what happens to salespeople who are skilled at selling, but aren’t very good at building relationships, as well as those who are great at building relationships but aren’t very skilled at selling. While there were some terrific insights, the one thing that was missing from the article was what great relationship builders do that everyone else fails to do.

Looking holistically at talent is crucial for recognizing the full range of an individual's abilities. Enhancing adaptability, fostering diversity and psychological safety, and creating more inclusive environments whereby everybody has the opportunity to thrive shows that the uniqueness of each individual is valued. Not to mention, it harnesses their potential for the benefit of the individual and, ultimately, the organization.

Taking things personally at work is not a sign of weakness, but a reflection of your passion, commitment, and deep sense of responsibility. But what if your professional role has become too intertwined with your sense of self. While equating your value as a person with your performance at work is common, it’s also possible to break free from the pattern. In this article, the author offers five strategies for how to approach situations with more objectivity so that you can navigate your professional journey with greater clarity, balance, and effectiveness.

In 1968, Charles Portis’ book True Grit was released. The book and two subsequent movies told the story of a young woman’s pursuit of justice in the American West circa the 1870s. But that plot was more window dressing for a far more interesting story of an aging, curmudgeonly U.S. marshal who went by the moniker Rooster Cogburn. Cogburn was the agent through whom Mattie Ross would seek justice for her father's death.

Times of crisis and terror bring out the worst in some and the best in others. The latter are the stories that need telling. No one could reasonably expect these kinds of largess. Most of us might reasonably wonder whether we could summon the generosity and creativity to emulate such acts of generosity. But a word describing this sort of expansive impulse is this week’s addition to the Ethical Lexicon

Although the marketing world has been changing drastically over the years, some things have stayed the same. I'm talking about human psychology. There are tried and true tactics that win every time based on how we behave and what signals our subconscious behavior and emotional triggers. According to McKinsey & Co., 80% of consumers want retailers to personalize their experiences — so when you use sales psychology, your audience will believe you understand them and their needs.

Sales prospecting is hard for many reasons. Perhaps the hardest – millions of other people are doing it as well. Meaning, it can feel almost impossible to stand out. The key is leaning into your unique personality and finding out what works for you. But, sometimes, it helps to have some inspiration.

Six in 10 of today’s tech buyers are millennials, and they hold the largest number of decision-making roles in corporate buying. If you haven’t already learned how to sell to millennial buyers, it’s past time to get caught up. Millennials are the first generation to grow up with computers and internet access, and their habits are shaped accordingly. Millennial buyers spend more time researching online, abhor phone calls, and are socially conscious.

Businesses are bound to make mistakes and disappoint their customers. But how you build your apology message and your careful attention to executing it appropriately can make the difference between losing those customers or increasing their loyalty. When delivered well, your apology message can improve the customer relationship to the point where it is stronger than if the mistake had never happened — a phenomenon known as the service recovery paradox.

I once interviewed Karl Pillemer, the Cornell sociologist and author of “30 Lessons for Living: Tired and True Advice from the Wisest Americans.” He’d seen numerous studies showing that people in their 70s, 80s, and beyond were far happier than younger people. He was intrigued: “I keep meeting older people — many of whom had lost loved ones, been through tremendous difficulties, and had serious health problems —

The pandemic has forced major changes in how, when, and where people work. It has also bedeviled employers. Due in part to new hybrid and remote-working models, companies are struggling to find objective ways to gauge employee effectiveness—a critical challenge as labor costs have increased and worker productivity has declined.

The future of work will not be determined by technology, but by creating the right mix of education, exposure, and experience needed to develop skills and put them to work, creating a vastly more productive workplace and economy. In this article, the authors recommend a “70/20/10” learning model, in which only 10% of learning comes from formal instruction (education), 20% from social learning or mentorship (exposure), and 70% from hands-on, experiential practice with feedback (experience).

Self-reflection is the gateway to learning from sales experience, for both sales professionals and the people responsible for coaching them. The tricky part is finding the time to invest in self-reflection, but also—and this could be the real reason it happens less in sales—having a reliable way to do it. Sales self-reflection takes learning from experience to a whole new level, extracting the real gems from a sales interaction, and developing valuable skills that can be refined and applied in other situations.

Sales must be a top priority if you want your business to thrive. It's not enough to simply have a great product or service; you need to market it effectively and convince potential customers that it's worth their time and money. As we approach the year's final quarter, business owners across various industries are feeling the pressure to close out the year with high financial numbers.

Surveys. They're supposed to take the pulse of a company's performance through the eyes of their customers. However, they frequently deliver the opposite -- a veiled and biased pile of data that is used only for your monthly performance reports. This happens because many organizations are prone to customer deafness. Surveys are constructed based on what companies want to hear, rather than on what customers need to say.

While it is the sales team’s job to bring in business, simply cranking up the heat to get the numbers you want can produce an environment where stress backfires. Too much stress in any professional situation will mask talent and lead to poor decision-making. Instead of dialing up the pressure, the author recommends leaders engage with sellers in three areas: 1) Focus on creating an exceptional sales experience. 2) Focus on the sales process (not the outcome). 3) Focus on coaching to improve performance.

Back in the early years of this century, the U.K. had gone years without any real success in the sport of track cycling. Then, along came David Brailsford, a former professional cyclist who happened to have an MBA. As an article in the Harvard Business Review recounts, he transformed a team that had won a single gold medal in 76 years of trying into a superpower that won seven of the 10 gold medals available at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and then matched it four years later in London.

Dr. John C. Maxwell has been a public speaker and motivational teacher for more than 50 years. In his new book, The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication, he shares everything he’s learned from a lifetime of communication. This blog post is adapted from the book’s sixteenth chapter, “The Law of Results: The Greatest Success in Communication is Action.” Good leaders want to influence people to take action, make changes, and achieve goals to make the world a better place.

When providing feedback, we often stand in judgment of others, seeking to impart wisdom or tell others what to do. If we instead frame feedback as an invitation to solve problems collaboratively, we’ll often find that we achieve better short-term results while bolstering our relationship with others over the long term.

Behavior change is hard, but it’s a skill leaders who want to succeed amid near-constant organizational change need to develop. By increasing their self-awareness, committing to change, overcoming limiting thoughts, and deliberately practicing new behaviors, leaders raise the likelihood that the change initiatives they’re tasked to lead will be successful.