There are countless TED Talks available. These TED Talks have the ability to motivate and inspire people to push their personal and professional boundaries.

We decided to spend some time looking for the best TED Talks for sales professionals. This means that we discovered the best TED Talks, under 15 minutes in length, that help teach or remind us how to be more effective people.

The talks below aren’t specifically about sales, but they outline principles that make us better navigators of the business world.

Enjoy the 4 best TED Talks for sales professionals and check our post on great books about lead generation.

1. What it takes to be a great leader, Roselinde Torres

In this TED Talk, we meet Roselinde Torres. She uses her 25 years of observing great leaders at work or studying. What Torres has noticed is what makes some people great leaders, and what makes other subpar. The gist of what you’ll learn in this TED Talk is how to ask:

1. What are you doing to anticipate the next change?

2. What is the diversity measure of your personal and professional stakeholder network?

3. Are you courageous enough to abandon a practice that has made you successful in the past?

[embed]https://youtu.be/aUYSDEYdmzw[/embed]

2. Your body language shapes who you are, Amy Cuddy

Amy Cuddy, provides amazingly useful tips on how to improve your communication skills in this TED Talk. She tries to make the case that “tiny tweaks can lead to big changes.” This notion is backed up by a fair amount of research, which has consistently shown us that “we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language.”

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks-_Mh1QhMc[/embed]

3. The tribes we lead, Seth Godin

In this TED Talk, Seth Godin talks about what makes people great leaders. He does this by explaining how most of us are trying to change everything: “we try to find a piece of the status quo — something that bothers us, something that needs to be improved, something that is itching to be changed–and we change it. We try to make a big, permanent, important change.”

Godin explains that to be effective, it takes more than simply figuring out how to make an amazing presentation or spend more money spreading a message. He says that to be a good leader, you must inspire people. You must make a person want to feel the need to connect with you and your idea.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=589tH-wtCak[/embed]

4. Life lessons from an ad man, Rory Sutherland

This TED Talk by Rory Sutherland is insanely entertaining. In his entertaining talk, he talks about using more creative approaches to problem-solving than cost-benefit analysis or better engineering.

This talk is great for sales professionals because it reminds the viewer that “most problems are actually problems of perception.” In the beginning, he illustrates this notion cleverly by explaining how engineers spent a lot trying to make the train journey from London to Paris more enjoyable. To make the train journey more enjoyable, they focused on simply making the trip shorter, rather than spending less to make the time spent on the train more fun.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=audakxABYUc[/embed]