As the workplace evolves, so do the demands on leadership. The way we lead, train, and develop people must adapt to shifting expectations and challenges. For 2025, three pivotal leadership development trends stand out.  Ignoring them could leave your organization falling behind—but embracing them can propel your team forward. Let’s explore these trends and how programs like Lead in 30 are designed to address them.

Research has confirmed that many of the behaviors sales people execute actually drive down performance. Because sales people are largely unaware of how the brain instinctively creates a buying decision, they do not know if they are selling in a way that contradicts it. Yet, there have been thousands of scientific studies that have codified how the brain is hardwired to be influenced. When sales people align how they sell with these scientific principles their ability to sell is enhanced.

The days when a salesperson could close a sale with a "feature dump" presentation and win the sale are long gone. Unfortunately, many salespeople don’t know there is an alternative. They know they need to talk about "value" but how to do so isn’t as obvious.

This session is prescriptive and actionable. We will roll up our sleeves and discuss practical ways to identify sales issues involving people, leadership, pipeline, and process and some top actions to take immediately to work toward bigger revenues. Determine what you know and what you just think when it comes to facts about your sales team.

The old adage "People love to buy, but hate to be sold to" is rephrased from the seller side to "Salespeople love to win, but hate to lose." Sales management might say, "I want to help salespeople close business-and close the right business." Because as sales managers well know, the hot pursuit of a win can backfire when salespeople go after deals that aren't profitable.

Frequently selected for their ease of use and accessibility, gift cards are a tried and true incentive often used to encourage sales teams to meet and exceed their goals. However, many people think gift cards can be impersonal, and that the recipient may not feel truly recognized. When managers and executives shift their view of gift cards to branded currency, these simple rewards can quickly energize the sales team's engagement and performance.

For years, marketers have managed corporate social network accounts (i.e. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook,...) for branding purposes. Now, leading companies like IBM, ADP, and Hewlett Packard are going one step further. They are teaching their sales people how to leverage their social networks to generate high quality leads. The reason is simple. As B2B buyers rely more and more on social networks for purchasing decisions, successful sellers are sharing valuable content to position themselves as experts and attract buyers.

A recent survey found that organizations exceeding revenue goals stand out as developing thoughtful, buyer-first strategies. And at the heart of these strategies is sales and marketing alignment.  

AI is rewriting the rules of business, even as enterprises themselves struggle to implement it. Executives are intrigued by AI's potential, but they often question how AI can truly work for them. Where can AI generate real business value? Where does - and doesn’t - it have tangible use cases? How can teams be set up to effectively deploy and manage it for long-term success?

Sales and Marketing teams exist in highly competitive, ever-shifting environments. Determining your teams’ focus can be a game changer and help set the stage for immediate and long-term WINS.   

Our post-pandemic recovery has left us with instability in our supply chain, inflation, and a unique work environment. As a result, even the most solid retention and growth strategies must adapt and continue to raise the bar to ensure their contributions to brand and business value keep pace. There has never been a better time to reconsider the role of Business-to-Business (B2B) incentive and loyalty strategies.  

4 Unconventional Team Motivation Hacks Every Manager Needs to Know

This webinar will teach 4 unique strategies that will position and enable sales managers to be more successful. For the past 30 years sales teams have hovered around roughly 48 to 52% not hitting their quotas with this statistic changing very little. This means the sales industry to a certain extent has flatlined. This webinar will teach accountability tactics that can position sales managers to be more successful when managing their teams. 

Companies around the globe have canceled sales meetings and training sessions and are enacting work from home policies to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. Yet sales enablement professionals must get new hires up to speed and keep teams on track in a world where face-to-face meetings are impossible. Traditional training and sales enablement approaches won’t solve this challenge. But building a virtual training program when you’ve relied on in-person sessions can feel like an overwhelming task. Fortunately, there are proven tactics that organizations can employ to train across geographies and time zones. Use this guide to learn how the right strategy and technology can help you manage high-performing virtual teams.

Why Your ROI Story Is Stronger Than You Think If you’re in charge of training a sales team, you know how hard it is to ensure they properly receive and retain training while in the field. But since organizations often treat sales training as an unavoidable cost of doing business, you may find it even harder to justify investing in technology that would improve your learning program. Sales, sales enablement, and sales training leaders often don’t realize how much investing in sales training technology contributes to a stronger ROI. That’s because most companies haven’t instituted best practices for identifying the business impact of better sales learning. Most limit their tracking to activity metrics like usage and adoption, or they capture anecdotes about how a recent training contributed to closing a specific deal. Quantifying the full return on your sales training investments helps you more effectively champion your initiatives and win more resources. That way, you can improve your team’s performance and create a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. Here are four sources of ROI you’re already delivering that you should capture to demonstrate how sales training contributes to the bottom line of your organization. Click below to download this eBook.

Digital Transformation is forcing all businesses to re-examine their business models, partnerships and how they sell. Frontline sales managers have to coach their resources to be sharper & more ready for all manner of customer conversations and to perform better than ever before because there is new competition around every corner.

Today, there are lots of ways to get hybrid sales training and enablement wrong.  But fear not! 

Charts and graphs are an incredibly powerful way to present your data, but even minor mistakes can bury your insights in clutter and confusion. This e-book will help you tell a clear and compelling story every time with critical tips on color choices, choosing formats for different data types, avoiding "chart junk," and more.

Are your sales reps operating in a crowded marketplace where prospects are more rapidly becoming more knowledgeable and competitors more aggressive?  In environments like these, it's easier than ever for your sales team and product messages to get lost in the noise. 

LinkedIn isn’t just for business professionals and job seekers. It is the best platform to grow your business and network with your clients/prospects. Generating leads, brand awareness, building relationships, and making connections is just some of the value it provides.

Transform Your Sales & Marketing Enablement at the Speed of Business: Lessons from Microsoft’s Leading-Edge "Corporate MOOCs"   The challenge facing most organizations: transforming at scale and at speed. The answer for Microsoft was leading-edge "Corporate MOOCs" which they have continually innovated in their quest to transform to a mobile-first cloud-first company at 21st century speed.

As workplaces become more distributed, managers often find themselves managing remote or virtual team members. This geographic distance sets virtual leaders up to make five critical management mistakes that can reduce productivity, derail teamwork, undermine organizational loyalty, and increase turnover. Without team agreements about expectations and processes, working on a virtual team can feel like floating on a rudderless boat in the ocean.

We have identified five potential areas of failure in sales process/sales methodology implementation in the midst of data-driven sales transformation.  These areas are broad and multifaceted, but we have explained them within the context of the business issue, and their effects on process implementation, as well as the way that shifting process implementations can affect business issues.

Sales organizations train, practice, coach and share knowledge differently now than they did just five years ago. The modern learning practices they utilize reflect exciting new opportunities to drive better sales performance at lower cost, using powerful systems and technologies available today.