Ready to transform how you use AI tools? Learn how to refine your prompts, avoid common pitfalls, and maximize the potential of generative AI tools. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot can be powerful. Even though generative AI is a fairly new technology, a powerful limitation on its use dates back to the 1950s or earlier: GIGO. GIGO means "garbage in, garbage out." If you ask AIs the wrong questions or don't ask them correctly, you're pretty much guaranteed to get nonhelpful answers.

Most of us think great marketing is all about closing the deal, but what if telling people they don’t have to buy is the real secret? Maybe you’ve experienced this too, that moment when someone shares an idea that feels so against your instincts, you want to reject it outright. That’s what happened when my friend, behavioral scientist Nancy Harhut, introduced me to her counterintuitive marketing strategies last year at SXSW.

Value-based selling is an essential skill for sales professionals, especially in markets where price often becomes the determining factor for clients. In many cases, these decisions occur because the products or services appear similar, leaving price as the only differentiator. When this happens, the issue often stems from a failure to effectively communicate the value that goes beyond the cost. Shifting the focus from price to value requires a structured approach. A simple three-step process can help sales professionals present value in a way that resonates with clients.

These days, customers aren't just looking for a great product or service. They want an experience that's smooth, hassle-free, and feels like it was designed just for them. If you're not delivering that, your competitors are ready and waiting to steal them away. Salesforce's "State of the Connected Customer" report makes it clear: 80% of customers say the experience a company offers is just as important as its products or services.

Modern media will have you believe sales motivation is best delivered in the form of an inspirational quote. But, while an inspirational quote can go a long way, it’s simply not going to fix any deep-rooted sales performance issues. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to diagnosing and fixing a performance issue on your sales team. That’s why we’ve created this sales performance checklist. This sales checklist will help even the most seasoned sales leaders pinpoint and correct problems happening on their teams.

As we approach the end of the year and begin planning for Q1 2025, it’s the perfect time to focus on boosting employee productivity, well-being, and engagement. According to the 2024 Global Talent Trends report by Mercer, a staggering 82% of professionals feel stressed, overwhelmed, and at risk of burnout. This is not just a personal challenge—it’s a critical business issue.

Most of us have an inner dialogue, that little voice in our heads that crystallizes what we think about what’s happening around us, or to us. And for years, researchers have found benefits to using positive self-talk, that is, optimistic and encouraging phrases that help you reframe the way you view a situation. For example, when a group of researchers systematically analyzed 47 studies on the relationship between self-talk and performance.

As a leader, how do you approach challenges in your organization? Do you see them as problems to be solved, or puzzles to be pieced together? In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, this distinction could be the key to unlocking innovation and thriving in uncertain times. The shift from problem-solving to puzzle-solving isn’t just a change in terminology – it’s a fundamental shift in mindset that can transform how your team tackles complex issues.

I didn’t set out to start a gratitude ritual with my colleagues at Jotform. A few years ago, as the holiday season approached, I was overwhelmed by the number of tasks left to complete. The stress was so distracting that it made it hard to focus. To break the cycle of rumination, I grabbed a pen and wrote a quick note to one of our directors. She had been balancing family commitments and work projects yet still managed to bring her enthusiasm to a recent team effort.

Modern Problems…Every sales team I talk to these days seems to have the same mandate: profitable growth. Sales leaders are under pressure to grow revenue in a complex selling environment with static or even reduced headcount and expense budgets.… Require Modern Solutions. AI is transforming B2B sales, unlocking the ability to scale top-performing behaviors across your entire team. But AI is only as powerful as the data and context that fuel it.

Sales and Customer Success (CS) teams are the dual engines of revenue growth, yet too often they operate in silos, each with separate goals. Daisy Chung, Head of Revenue Strategy at Orum, underscores that revenue growth comes from a synchronized approach between these two departments. While specialization in roles, such as Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) and Account Executives (AEs), can boost efficiency, it often creates gaps and communication breakdowns between departments.

Customer success is essential for any startup, at every stage. It’s what ensures customers are engaged, adopting, and gaining value from your product. But many startups get customer success wrong. This is partially due to a lack of understanding about how to design customer success, but also due to a lack of understanding of the goals of your customers. I once asked a startup CEO, What do customers get out of your product?

Young managers aren’t just using AI to boost efficiency — they see it as a tool to become better leaders. A new report from Google Workspace, conducted by the Harris Poll, surveyed more than 1,000 “knowledge workers ages 22 to 39 who are employed or self-employed full time and currently hold or aspire to hold a leadership position.” Of these workers, 86 percent believe that AI “can help current leaders become better managers,” per the report, and 79 percent are interested in using it to become a better manager themselves.

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sir Winston Churchill, the iconic British Prime Minister who led his nation out of the dark days of World War II to victory. Most often, Sir Winston expressed his inspirational leadership with the oratorical skills he exhibited in the more than 2,500 speeches he gave over his lifetime. In a prior blog, you read how you can adopt the five principal elements of content and delivery Churchill deployed in his speeches in your own presentations.

My company, Jotform, was not an overnight success. I didn't wake up one day to find myself the darling of TechCrunch or attract massive funding rounds from VCs ravenous to get in on the form-building action. I probably don't have to tell you that a form-builder is not the world's sexiest basis for a startup. But that doesn't bother me one bit. Jotform became successful not because it's flashy, but because our products work.

If there was something that 81% of people spent time at work doing, yet 84% of people also agree that it's not working — wouldn't that be a strong incentive to make critical changes? According to Asana's 2024 State of Workplace Innovation report and data shared in Asana keynote speeches, that exact scenario is playing out in businesses worldwide. What is this broken activity? Collaboration. In fact, 90% of workers rely on informal networks, friends, and unspoken understandings to get things done.

"Difficult prospects are a fact of sales life, and dealing with a difficult buyer who makes a sale harder than it needs to will always suck — and from time to time, you're bound to deal with an especially difficult buyer who makes a sale especially harder than it needs to be, and that experience will especially suck."

It wasn’t that many years ago when the expected image of a hotel general manager was a tall, most likely white, man sporting a folded handkerchief in the pocket of his perfectly tailored black blazer. Things have come a long way, and quickly, in the hospitality industry since that era. Corinne Heyl has worked at multiple luxury hotels in leadership positions and is now VP of Hotel Operations for The Boca Raton, overseeing four related hotels in South Florida: The Yacht Club, The Tower, The Cloisters, and The Bungalows.

More than a dozen years ago, when I was coaching Little League, I had two boys on my 9-year-old team that never made contact with the ball. It didn’t take much time with them to realize they were both swinging with their eyes closed. I thought that if I could get them to swing with their eyes at least partially open, they might get their hands and bat close enough to the ball so that there was a chance the ball could hit their bats.

More businesses are dealing with longer sales cycles than in the past, and this is piling pressure on Chief Sales Officers (CSOs) to improve team performance. But it’s not just external market forces causing headaches—many sales organizations are struggling internally, too. In fact, a quarter of top sales companies say they’re not fully leveraging data to help with decision-making, Korn Ferry’s 2024 Sales Maturity Survey reveals, and this is impacting both individual and team outcomes.