An excerpt from, The Thinking Salesperson: Assess this Key Competency to Better Compete for Market Share
Robert W. Adams, 2004

...the growing consensus of the group was that they wanted to be able to identify employees who had the wherewithal to figure out new and better ways to build relationships with customers, discover and meet customer needs, use available resources, negotiate mutually beneficial contracts, and to offer new products and services to existing ones. The organization's business and target market was changing rapidly, becoming more global and competitive. New relationships with customers, shippers, and partners were emerging. So while they placed value on employees who possess the more traditional sales competencies of influencing, achieving, prospecting, negotiating, and so on, they came to the conclusion that the competency that will drive the organization forward to higher productivity and profit was the competency they referred to as, 'critical thinking'.