In an educational session on the last day of CompTIA’s Breakaway 2012, Keith Eades, CEO at Sales Performance International, sent attendees home with six pointers for better selling:

1. Adopt a customer- and solution-centric philosophy – i.e., answer the customer’s problem.
2. Use a buyer-aligned sales process – i.e., know more about how buyers buy than how your organization sells.
3. Align sales and marketing – messaging, tools and conversations.
4. Use management systems and disciplines that foster and sustain process and methodology adoption.
5. Enable with technology that explicitly supports process, methodology and management practices.
6. Have a continual “learning framework” (skills assessment, training and multi-year reinforcement) that aligns with process and sales methodologies.