Some sales teams have it. And some don’t. What makes some B2B sales teams great? In working with B2B sales teams for 25 years, I have discovered that there are three key qualities that set high-performing sales teams apart – the right goals structure, authentic camaraderie, and a foundation of trust.

Whether your sales team is consistently exceeding expectations, plateauing at meeting but not exceeding goals, or underperforming relative to their targets, there is always room for improvement. Of course, like anything else in business, increasing B2B sales performance requires both managerial support and individual initiative. Let’s talk about how sales managers can get more out of their team and retain their best salespeople as well as how B2B salespeople can sell better.

With all the buzz right now around integrating AI and automation solutions into organizational strategy, it is worth taking the time to understand what kind of benefits marketing automation can offer and how to best utilize it to drive organizational success.

Let’s look at which kinds of activities are included in marketing automation, where it is best utilized to drive value, what its limitations are, the ethical considerations to keep in mind along the way, and what is coming next.

Undoubtedly, you have heard the famous phrase, “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” And yet, inherent in this quote is the misconception that the reverse is true as well – that if you measure it, you will also be able to improve it. This errant belief can cause leadership to overemphasize measuring a wide array of disparate metrics. The result is “measurement paralysis”, where true KPIs (key performance indicators) get drowned out by a cacophony of tracking and analysis.

So, how can you determine which numbers are the best metrics to track? We have put together a guide to B2B KPIs to help you better understand what to look at and how to identify KPI gaps.

For the last 15 years I have worked as a content creator and copywriter, first for (what was then) the world’s leading ecommerce software provider and later for myself as a business owner. And today, I considered walking away from that to work for minimum wage at McDonald’s. Let me explain what happened...

Business alignment is everyone rowing in the same direction at the same time to get where they want to go together. When departments and divisions across the whole company are aligned around a singular objective, they will accomplish what they set out to do. Therefore, alignment is how businesses achieve their goals.

However, alignment is far more elusive than many business leaders realize. A Harvard Business Review analysis of strategic alignment made the following discovery:

“We asked more than 500 frontline employees, middle managers, and senior executives across 12 different organizations to indicate how aligned they thought their companies were with respect to corporate strategy. And we found that the participants were largely optimistic, on average reporting that they felt strategic agreement within their companies was 82%. But when we analyzed detailed written explanations from those same employees around what their company’s strategies were, we found that actual alignment (as measured by the linguistic overlap in the concepts and words they listed) was, on average, just 23% — two to three times lower than perceived alignment.”

Of course, that begs the question, would you even know if your organization was misaligned?

An article in the March-April 2023 edition of the Harvard Business Review titled Beware a Culture of Busyness had a very strong message to share with readers: “Organizations must stop conflating activity with achievement.” It explains why busyness has become so valued in organizations these days as well as the significant damage that results from prioritizing and rewarding busyness. If you get a chance to read/listen to the article and want to share your thoughts with us, feel free to do so.

We would like to add our own thoughts based on what we have seen from helping B2B companies achieve strategic revenue growth for almost two decades. In our efforts to help move organizations away from a busyness culture we’re discussing the dangers of being busy, who is to blame for today’s busyness culture, and how to evolve to increase profitable revenue.

Content marketing is hotter than ever right now and shows no signs of slowing down. As a recent Forbes article explains, “Effective marketing and content creation are inextricably linked. It’s one of the best ways to regularly connect with your audience while boosting your reputation and credibility. ...[So,] in today’s digital-first consumer ecosystem, it’s increasingly important to generate content for potential and recurring buyers.” Echoing this sentiment, HubSpot has declared content marketing to be the most effective form of marketing today, saying, "Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts audience decision-making more than any other technique."

As content marketing continues to be an effective lead generation and customer acquisition tool, companies are starting to evaluate whether new AI-based tools like ChatGPT can provide low-cost assistance with their ongoing content creation efforts.

The answer to the question of whether ChatGPT can save a company money compared to the cost of hiring a professional content writer or digital marketing company is obvious. Using ChatGPT costs a fraction of what a professional service of any type would charge because anyone at any level of the business can generate an article on any topic in a matter of minutes. There is no first-hand knowledge required or research needed to get an article created. You simply need to ask a few questions and copy/paste the answers into a document and voila, you have an article. The hours of brainstorming, researching, outlining, and writing that an experienced content writer would normally spend are replaced by an AI algorithm that aggregates existing content into an article in a matter of minutes. It’s free and it’s fast.

Sounds great, right? Maybe not.

This is a question that business professionals ask a lot! There is hesitancy around the cost of joining, the time commitment involved, and whether the benefits gained in exchange will be worth it. But the answer to the question, “Should I join an association?” is yes! (Now, do not confuse that with the question, “Should I join every association?” because the answer to that question is a categorical no!) Don’t seize the opportunity to join every association that you come across but do be open to joining one that you can commit to wholly.