Are You Ready For 2012? A Quick Look Back At 2011.

Top Articles of 2011

New to the Solution Selling Blog? Or are you a committed reader? Welcome and welcome back. At SPI we are more committed than ever to be the go-to thought-leaders of the sales performance improvement industry. We are consistently looking ahead to changes in the marketplace, trends, tools and learning methods to influence our practices and programs. We incorporate research and feedback into our decisions and work diligently to forward the knowledge and skills we pass on to our clients. So in with the new year and out with the old. But… before we move forward with a wealth of new sales knowledge in 2012, let’s take a brief look back to see what mattered most to readers in 2011.

	Do You Really Understand Your Customer’s Problems? One common sales challenge I have been hearing a lot lately is that sales people are not having consultative dialogues with the customer. As a result, sales cycles become longer or win rates drop. Let me paint the picture…
	Rumors of Solution Selling’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated You can’t really blame our competitors for trying to do and say things to tarnish our brand, Solution Selling® - it’s the nature of the beast when you are among the market leaders… we take it as a confirmation of a leadership position…
	Re-Thinking Sales Training - 2011 and Beyond To maximize an organization’s return on sales training investments, sales leaders and managers need to consider three key issues before investing in a sales training initiative, as illustrated in the article…
	Selling Styles: Art or Science(A Love Story) I love my job. My primary responsibility is to create LEADS. In my career, I’ve created a few hundred thousand quality leads to be distributed across an array of sales teams. With numbers of this scale, the main issue that kills me is not necessarily the lead source, cost per lead, OR lead quality…
	Column Fodder My favorite locale is the (gold standard) that defined the qualities that I truly enjoy in a burrito - everyone else that I consider, well, they have a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, the ‘other’ restaurants offering burritos have become columns B, C, and so on in my evaluation…
	Winners Versus Losers - What Does Research Tell Us? Of more general interest is what we learned about top performing companies – companies that have significantly higher quota attainment and revenue attainment. The “best-in-class” companies outpace laggards in a number of areas, including…