About The Sales Board

Improve Your Sales Skills and Selling Strategy

“Research and Sales Certification Technology”

Action Selling training from The Sales Board produces real gains in sales performance—gains that can be seen in salespeople’s behavior and measured in actual dollars. This is due to two basic reasons. One, Action Selling teaches sales skills that really make a difference and that can be taught. Two, the training incorporates mechanisms to ensure that those skills are actually used on the job.

Prior to founding The Sales Board in 1990, Duane Sparks owned and managed a computer company named Currentech. During the 1980s, even though the computer industry as a whole was growing at exponential rates, Currentech grew six times faster than the industry average. This was only possible because of the way Duane taught his people to sell. In 1989, he sold the company and decided to create The Sales Board, which would use research and technology to perfect his system and boost the performance of salespeople in any industry.

Five years of initial research focused on developing a clear understanding of exactly which selling skills had the greatest impact on performance change. Five Critical Selling Skills emerged.

Research into the sales training industry turned up another key fact. The greatest weakness of The Sales Board’s competitors was their failure to ensure that skills and knowledge learned in class actually got applied on the job. Nearly two decades later, that is still our competitors’ biggest weakness. In learning theory, it’s known as the problem of "transfer." You can teach people to do something in class, but getting them to do it that way in the field is a different thing altogether.

In 1995, The Sales Board began assessing the skills of salespeople with the use of the Benchmark Selling Skills Assessment. The assessment technology was continually refined. To date, more than 300,000 salespeople have been assessed, trained, certified, and measured against standards of performance change. No other company has developed anything remotely comparable to this database of skill measurement and corresponding performance change.

The knowledge we have gained has been completely incorporated into the Action Selling training process. That is why The Sales Board can claim these major sales training innovations:

When we say that Action Selling teaches the Five Critical Selling Skills, this is not just a marketing boast. These skills are trainable, measurable, and have the greatest impact on performance change. We have the research to prove it.
Action Selling transfers more skill into the field than any other training methodology. This is ensured by our online sales training LearningLink technology, as well as the incorporation of a number of proven adult-learning principles.
Research proves that once salespeople become certified through the Action Selling LearningLink, their performance improves at six times the rate of salespeople who are not trained on Action Selling.

The Sales Board trains and certifies salespeople in the particular skills that have the greatest impact on sales performance. And from the ground up, our programs are designed to ensure that those critical skills are not only "learned" but used, consistently, in the field. Today, as a result of Action Selling Certification, over 2,500 companies and 300,000 salespeople have dramatically increased their ability to make money selling with six times the revenue increases of others.

Build a Sales Certification Plan for Your Sales Force.