In 1990, under the direction of author Duane Sparks, Action Selling was created. The company began with the question: Which selling skills have the greatest impact on sales productivity? “You can’t teach anyone 100 different things to focus on,” said Sparks. You need to have a finite number of skill improvement areas to work on.” After five (5) years of research, a short list of Critical Selling Skills emerged as the most important sales productivity boosters. Since 1995, more than 400,000 salespeople have been assessed, trained, certified, and then measured to validate this research. No other company has developed anything remotely comparable to this database of skill measurement and corresponding performance change.