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Big Brother: CCTV Surveillance

Research shows that salespeople will never reach their performance potential without a well defined sales call procedure that they can follow and learn from. "Winging it" on sales calls has grim consequences - lost sales, extended selling cycles, margin erosion and no clear path to improvement. Bottom line: Your entire sales career can be mediocre at best if you "wing it."

Performance improves by as much as 50% when salespeople have a consistent game plan for their sales calls.

Most salespeople make the same mistakes over and over without realizing it. Without a logical sales process to follow, they can't even identify specific problems, let alone correct them. A good sales process mirrors the pattern by which customers make buying decisions. The nine acts of Action Selling break a sales call into its most important components, sequenced in the order of the five key buying decisions every customer makes. By analyzing each segment of a call and testing against the customer's buying decisions, salespeople can quickly recognize problems and adjust their behavior accordingly.

Without a system like Action Selling, the only thing salespeople can look at is whether they won or lost the sale. If you don't know what went wrong or why, you can't improve your performance.

In The Field:

A leading architectural service faced a common problem. They were having trouble trying to sell an intangible service that was seen more as a luxury than a necessity. The firm's growth had stopped and they were losing business to far less capable competitors.

The Sales Board delivered a 2-day onsite Action Selling Sales Training workshop for their sales staff, teaching the Action Selling process and documenting the company's Best Sales Practices. Twelve weeks of Skill Drill Modules followed, further honing the new selling and sales relationship skills the group had acquired.

Within only three months the CEO reported business grew by 20%. In addition, he said, "My [sales] team's professionalism and sense of confidence increased as a direct result of the Action Selling sales training and sales skill certification program. Having a clear understanding of the selling strengths and weaknesses of each sales team member has made sales management both focused and effective for the first time."

Duane Sparks

Duane Sparks is chairman and founder of The Sales Board, a Minneapolis-based sales training company that has trained and certified more than 200,000 salespeople in the system and skills of Action Selling. He has personally facilitated more than 300 Action Selling training sessions.

In a 30-year career as a salesperson and sales manager, Duane has sold products ranging from office equipment to insurance. He was the top salesperson at every company he ever worked for. He developed Action Selling while owner of one of the largest computer marketers in the United States. Even in the roaring computer business of the 1980's, his company grew six times faster than the industry norm, differentiating itself not by the products offered but by the way it sold them. Duane founded The Sales Board in 1990 to teach the skills of Action Selling to others.