Deliberate practice holds profound implications for skill development in many domains. Whether it's getting better at skiing or mastering other skills like leadership and communication skills, the principles remain the same. With each deliberate repetition, new neural pathways are forged, and long-term memory retention is enhanced, paving the way for non-conscious and more effortless performance.

The bottom line: to effectively use High-Impact Questions, you must do your homework. Understand your client's business, their industry, and the challenges they face. Combined with the High-Impact Question formula, this knowledge will enable you to craft questions that resonate, challenge, and engage.

Training designed to improve the customer experience for diverse customers often teaches key concepts like racism, oppression, privilege, bias, and microaggression. Addressing these knowledge gaps is essential. But just as important, maybe more so, is teaching new skills and behaviors.

Unconscious bias can derail a sales conversation in several ways. Being aware of your own biases and understanding how they influence your customer’s journey can improve your relationships and increase your close rate.

Unconscious bias can derail a sales conversation in several ways. Being aware of your own biases and understanding how they influence your customer’s journey can improve your relationships and increase your close rate.

With a unique and challenging year behind us, now is the time to reflect on how the pandemic is bringing digital conversations to the forefront in 2021. Sales success will be determined by how well these conversations flow and convert.

For over 17 years, we’ve tracked the performance of every salesperson in every one of hundreds of thousands of conversations. With all this qualitative and quantitative data we can say that the two most important skills (and the two that are often performed worst) are curiosity and empathy.