While the world most likely won’t end on December 21, 2012, it can be the end of ineffective business practices in favor of true best practices that achieve better results.

These include:

Always be collaborating versus always be closing
Yes, it’s the job of sales to facilitate a process that ultimately closes the deal. However, over-used and ineffective closing techniques, such as the assumptive close and the hard close, are hardly the way to build a sustainable and mutually beneficial relationship. A fully collaborative approach where the buyer talks themselves into buying allows the best closer in the room, the buyer, not the salesperson, to close the deal.

Stay with the basics versus back to basics
If you have to get back to basics that means you got away from them in the first place. Maintaining consistent accountability to true best practices ensures customers are always well served and time is well spent on enhancing your business instead of reimplementing what should already be in place.

Client facilitation versus client control
Do you like to be controlled? Most likely not and your customers feel the same way. Free-will dictates that you can’t control anyone, yet, you can advance a process that identifies needs, provides solutions that addresses those needs, overcomes objections, and closes the sale. If the buyer’s needs are always kept front and center, and the solutions you provide meet those needs, no control is required. All that is necessary is for you to guide the buyer through the process to acquire those solutions.

So, on December 21st say goodbye to ineffective old school practices and usher in a new era of collaboration with your customers. Maybe, just maybe, that’s what the Mayans had in mind in the first place.