The Sales Leader Blog
The latest insights on Sales Leadership, Sales Training, Sales Strategy, and Sales Effectiveness
The Most Common Sales Onboarding Mistake (and How to Fix It)
Many sales onboarding programs make a common mistake: They spend weeks on product training before touching skills. This produces very knowledgeable sellers who can’t run a good discovery call. A more effective approach is to do a brief product orientation up...
8 Behaviors That Drive Sales Outcomes
What separates high-performing sales teams from everyone else isn’t the tools they use or the process they follow—it’s the behaviors woven into everything they do. Sales leaders have long searched for the lever that unlocks team performance. They invest in better CRM...
Sales Training for Manufacturing: 7 New Essentials
Manufacturing is in the middle of a major transition. Sales teams are navigating a difficult mix of market pressure, operational complexity, and rapidly evolving buyer expectations. Customers are more informed, buying cycles are more complex, and differentiation is...
The Value of Post-Mortem Sales Analysis
A post-mortem sales analysis can be one of an industrial sales leader’s most powerful tools. In industrial sales, every deal is hard-won—and every lost opportunity is expensive. Long sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, technical complexity, and high deal values mean...
Why a Customer-Centric Sales Process Wins More Deals
Most sales organizations today don’t struggle with having a sales process—they’ve already solved for that. Our Sales Leader Report research shows: 94% of sales organizations have a well-defined sales process 98% have embedded that process into their CRM 78% report...
How to Shift from Seller-Centric to Customer-Centric Selling
Most sales organizations today have something in common: They’ve invested heavily in building and enforcing a sales process. And on the surface, that’s a good thing. Our latest sales leader research report shows: 94% of sales organizations have a well-defined sales...
Pre-Call Planning: How to Ensure Your Sales Team Is Ready to Win
One of the most overlooked sales coaching opportunities today is pre-call planning. And it’s often the difference between a productive, value-driven conversation and a stalled opportunity. According to the 2026 Sales Leader Report, sales leaders say pre-call planning...
7 Sales Team Development Strategies to Improve Performance
When we set out to develop the 2026 Sales Leader Report, our goal was simple: Understand how sales leaders are navigating a rapidly changing environment shaped by AI, shifting buyer expectations, and increasing pressure to do more with less. What we found was both...