Sales and Selling.
I realised today that I'd given little thought recently to one of my key areas of interest ... sales and selling.

Many years ago I was deeply involved in sales training for one of the major office equipment corporates. Whilst I owed my own skills to a very training oriented business systems company in Birmingham (they gave all sales people 12 weeks of residential training!), I was dissatisfied with most current approaches to training and understanding of the process of a sale.
In the early '60s most sales training in the UK was based on a series of training films by an American couple called Richard C. Borden and Alvin C. Busse. Their approach was probably based on 1930s thinking and was totally unsuited to the needs of sales people at that time in England (the early 60s).
Bordern and Busse built their sale around a series of steps that you had to be adept at performing if you were to become a 'supersalesman' (no political correctness in those days) ... Attention, Interest, Demonstration and Analysis ... AIDA. Every other training program I could find in those days seemed to be similar ... teaching you the things you had to do to 'get the prospect to buy'!  I was pretty dismayed ...  the focus of all of them and the focus of most of our sales recruits was on what you had to do to the prospect, rather than ... which had been my own approach as a salesman ... what was happening in the prospect's mind . 
It seemed clear to me that if I wanted to turn out well trained professional sales people I had to engender a major shift in their thinking: "Stop thinking about what you are doing to the prospect — focus your thinking on what is happening in the prospect's mind. Concentrate on the stages through which you can guide his thinking on his path towards experiencing, for himself, the great benefits your product has to offer him".
More about this later but eventually, with a group of like minded people, a new way of thinking about the sale and the 'prospect's progress' took our national team to the top of the company's sales productivity world wide, it enabled us to become super accurate in sales forecasting and eventually to develop new concepts in bottom-up planning and matrix management that were light years ahead!