“Is there one business model that you would recommend to a budding entrepreneur?”

That was the question a young man asked me recently. I reflected for a moment over the past 25 years, and answered this way:

“No. I’ve worked with over 500 businesses, and in that pack, there were lots of different business models. What I’ve seen is that the model is less important than the implementation on the part of the company’s leadership.”

If there is only one practice within the scope of the professional sales person upon which you can focus, let it be to gain mastery in asking better sales questions. A series of better sales questions provides you leverage and a competitive edge at every stage of the sales process.

Motivation is one of the least understood concepts in the business world. If you want to achieve any degree of success in your career, you can and should motivate yourself. Here’s a first step that will impact the rest of your life.

Building rapport with customers is a fundamental sales skill. Yet, few salespeople have been trained in the specific tactics to facilitate this. Here are seven ways to build rapport with anyone.

Whether you are a small businessperson or a professional salesperson, you can utilize a powerful strategy to take your performance to dramatically higher levels -- leverage. Leverage revolves around the idea of multiplying the effects of some effort to gain more value from it. Leverage will take you to a higher level.

Are successful salespeople made or born? It is the eternal question: the sales manager’s version of nature versus nurture.

While countless books and articles have addressed “what successful salespeople do", few have described “who successful salespeople are.”

I don’t claim to have the last word on this, nor do I believe that this group of characteristics is the whole story. But, from one person’s perspective, here are my observations of the essential character traits of a successful salesp

In recent years, I’ve seen a deeper degradation in the learning potential of the work force fueled by a growing inability to concentrate. I’m afraid that much of the adult population in this country has become so conditioned to sound bytes, texts and tweets that they have lost the discipline to “do the work.” Like an unused muscle, their ability to concentrate has atrophied. On one hand, that is alarming. On the other, it is a tremendous opportunity for you.

“Success,” like “beauty” is a slippery term whose definition depends, in some significant way, on the perspective of the observer. In this article, I unpack the definition of success for a salesperson.

Failure can be a powerful influence in building our character. In this podcast, we look at a couple notable failures and consider the relationship between failure and the powerful character traits of pride and humility. This can impact your life and your career.

We are all guilty of projecting our values onto our customers. If we think nothing is worth the stated price, we subconsciously project that attitude onto our customers, and find ourselves constantly discounting.