Can a new mattress change your life? Maybe—more on that later. But my recent experience shopping for a mattress highlighted three essential sales insights that you can apply to B2B sales.

Training has gone through an incredible upheaval over the past two years. When the pandemic started, companies had to adjust quickly and adopt new ways of engaging learners due to travel restrictions and online meeting fatigue.

One key takeaway from the pandemic is the heightened importance of how sales managers communicate with their teams. Since the beginning, managers have dealt with a myriad of employee issues that require empathy and understanding. Unfortunately, many managers who were steeped in simply telling their teams what to do struggled as those messages fell silent. This was especially true with sales professionals who realized that they had many more employment options given the robust labor market (i.e., power had shifted from the company to the individual).

Like a championship sports team needs great athletes, exceptional salespeople are the lifeblood of a high-performing sales organization. But if you have recently recruited new salespeople, you probably have also experienced how brutal it is to try to hire top talent in today's market. Even during more favorable hiring conditions, hiring sales executives is risky. Every sales manager has horror stories of hiring promising candidates who later were poor performers.

Do you wonder why the most successful sales leaders in your organization reach their goals every quarter? They focus on ROI when engaging with customers and prospects.

Achieving sales goals is an essential part of sales management. While an annual sales goal may be “imposed” on a sales manager based on a company’s overall budget, this should be viewed as a starting point for planning purposes.