The year was 2020 and it was an unpredictable year. There were surprises galore. For example, instead of only bank robbers and anarchists from ANTIFA wearing masks, we were all told to always wear masks. Instead of forcing myself to be social among extroverts, I was given permission to be socially distant, a not so awful turn of events for an acute introvert like myself. The stock market lost and gained more than 10,000 points in the same year. Most companies pushed hard for the last six months attempting to generate enough revenue to offset their lackluster second quarter sales. All because of the pandemic. But there was one thing that didn't change. I still managed to churn out around fifty articles and after 15 years of blogging and almost 1,900 articles to date, I feel like most of the articles from this year were among my best ever. As has been the custom each December, today we name the top ten articles of 2020 and I hope you'll read every one of them.
The articles from 2020 fell mostly into three categories with some overlap to an obvious fourth category; the pandemic:
Category 1: Research, Data Mining and Assessments (19 articles including 6 that were pandemic-related)
Category 2: Sales and Selling (9 articles including 1 that was pandemic-related)
Category 3: Sales Leadership (17 articles including 8 that were pandemic-related)
There are many ways to vote the top ten articles including:
- views
- comments
- likes
- engagement
- personal favorites
- award nominations/wins
- appearances on top-10 lists
It's difficult to assign weightings to the list because more views doesn't necessarily mean that people liked or engaged with it, engagement doesn't mean people liked it, lack of comments doesn't mean people didn't like it, awards and top-10 lists are dependent on the people making such designations actually seeing and considering an article, and my favorites won't necessarily be your favorites. As this is partly scientific and partly subjective I introduce:
The Top 10 Articles of 2020
Best article on How to Conduct an Opportunity Review - This was a fun article to write because I was able to use the political divisiveness as a metaphor to demonstrate the correct and incorrect ways to conduct opportunity reviews.
Best Take-Down of a competitive assessment - Most competitive assessments don't stand a chance against OMG and I simply obliterated Extended Disc in this take-down! This article was even more fun because you can't make this stuff up!
Best article on the difficulty explaining the differences between salespeople - Most people can't explain or justify how one salesperson is better than another and are left to rely on revenue as the differentiator. But revenue is actually the single worst way to compare or differentiate salespeople and sales capabilities. This article explains why revenue comparisons don't work and presents a better way to make these comparisons.
Best article showing how sales effectiveness changed before, during and after the first recovery from the pandemic - Sales capabilities are sales capabilities, right? Not when it comes to a Pandemic. Some scores actually changed throughout the pandemic and into the summer recovery. This article shows what changed, what stayed the same and why.
Best article on how to be your best selling virtually over video - 6 upgrades that you must make to your virtual/video sales efforts to improve prospects' impressions of you.
Best use of an analogy to explain sales team effectiveness - Regular readers know I love to use analogies and I can turn almost anything into a sales analogy. This was not only one of my best analogies, LinkedIn readers piled on with more examples from this analogy.
Best article on explaining how metrics are used and their importance to sales - In yet another analogy article, I used pandemic metrics - many that aren't reported - to drive home the importance of having and identifying the correct sales metrics.
Best article showing correlation between a finding and sales success - There are dozens of OMG findings that correlate to Sales Percentile and ultimately, sales success, but the correlation to this finding hadn't been noticed prior to the publication of this article.
Best article on why sales managers are so bad at sales coaching - The data doesn't lie and this article is packed with data about what sales managers do and don't do, as well as how poorly they do it when it comes to coaching.
Best article on what you can do to have a great fourth quarter - While it's too late to impact the fourth quarter of 2020, this article has fifteen specific things you can do which, given the date on the calendar, will impact your first quarter of 2021.
Honorable Mention - these are some of my personal favorites
Most Controversial Article - Trump.
Best use of politics in an article - The first day of the Senate Confirmation Hearing on Amy Coney Barrett was chocked full of examples of how not to convince people to do what you want them to do.
Best article dealing with the Pandemic - How to lead your team in times of crisis.
Best article using historical figures - I wasn't much of a history buff but I did find a way to include FDR and Sir Isaac Newton in this article about fear.
Which article did you like the most? Which article was most helpfuil?
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I found it difficult to select the Top 5 articles because that means different things to me. Most Popular? Best? Most Commented? Most Linked To? Favorite? Written in the last 6 months? Read in the last 6 months?
As we prepare for the holiday and year-end, I'm also preparing for this blog's 1,000th article. That's right; since 2006, I've posted nearly 1,000 articles. We've selected 15 of our favorites and on Monday, December 17, you'll be able to vote for your favorite from that list. Then, on Thursday, December 20, we'll post the winning article.
Following up yesterday's 
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