AI is changing B2B buying and selling at a remarkable pace, but I think we’re at risk of learning the wrong lesson from it. The future of B2B sales isn’t about humans competing with AI to see who can produce more information, faster. Buyers already have extraordinary access to research, analysis, comparisons, recommendations, and increasingly […]
Continue reading
Introduction Ask B2B buyers who they trust least during a purchase, and the answer isn’t flattering. In TrustRadius’s 2025 buyer research, sales reps came in dead last. Buyers trusted a product demo more. They trusted their own gut more. They trusted reviews written by total strangers more than the person whose job is to guide […]
Continue reading
Today, I want to dig into the transformation of the modern B2B seller. We talk a lot about things like process, methodology, content, tools, and technology, especially the rise of AI, but at the end of the day, B2B sales is still a human-to-human endeavor. The problem is, most humans are doing it wrong. This […]
Continue reading
Ray Delgado had run the manufacturing plant at Nuvanta AirTech for six years. For two of those, he’d been improving it one station at a time. He got results, too. Several stations ran measurably faster than they had. Utilization looked good. Scrap was down. Every number Ray could point to on a station-by-station basis had […]
Continue reading
Introduction I’ve been writing and speaking about what separates top sales performers from everyone else for more than two decades. The short answer has always been the same: it’s the Human Differentiators—the capabilities that require genuine human presence, judgment, and connection that AI struggles to replicate, even as its capabilities advance. Great salespeople are other-centric […]
Continue reading
Introduction When revenue targets are missed, the postmortem tends to follow a familiar script. The pipeline was light. The close rate slipped. Deals pushed. Sales didn’t execute. The prescribed remedy varies, but it usually involves some combination of more training, a new methodology, tighter inspection, some version of the “Harder, Faster, Longer, Louder” school of […]
Continue reading
A young executive was leaving the office late one evening when he found the CEO standing in front of a shredder with a piece of paper in his hand. “Listen,” the CEO said, “this is a very sensitive and important document, and my assistant has gone for the night. Can you make this thing work […]
Continue reading
Would you build a house on a foundation of mud and straw? Of course not. Yet that’s precisely what many organizations do when they shortchange Buyer Acumen—the deep, intentional understanding of your buyers that buyer-centric selling depends on—and proceed directly to building out their sales enablement programs, content libraries, training curricula, and messaging frameworks. The […]
Continue reading
In today’s post, we’ll explore why most sales managers still struggle to deliver consistent, effective coaching that actually moves the needle on performance and why a complete coaching system is the missing piece that turns good intentions into repeatable results. Introduction If you lead a sales team or support one, you’ve likely seen this story […]
Continue reading
The Data Is Worse Than the Headlines Suggest Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report landed last week, and the numbers should alarm every sales leader. Why? Because global manager engagement has collapsed from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025—a nine-point drop in three years, with the steepest single-year fall between 2024 and […]
Continue reading