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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As my regular readers know, my son is a baseball player – a rising college senior (as of the summer of 2023) – and I still coach him in the batting cage when he’s home for the summer. I started coaching him when he was old enough to hold a wiffle bat. By the time he was thirteen years old, he responded to every piece of hitting advice with, “I know Dad!” He was no longer coachable (by me), thus beginning a stretch of six years during which we hired various coaches to work with him.