What is more important: skillset or mindset? Come on – you know the answer. You can have all the techniques in the world, but if your head ain’t on straight, it’s over before you get started. If you don’t have the right mental approach – the mentality, attitude, and outlook – you will have very limited success.

Ryan Taft loves planning, scheduling and attempting to figure out how to maximize every moment to be his most productive self. Of course, he fails at this fairly often, but there are a few ways he figured out that have yielded fantastic results. ​Here are five easy strategies you can implement immediately to become your most productive self.

Closing is about making it easy for people to do what is in their best interest to do. Closing in its purest form is actually all about influencing and persuading others to do things that will improve their lives. Understanding why and how you influence others will help you identify what type of sales closer you are.

All too often, the sale is lost before it ever really gets started. Too many sales professionals practice bad habits right out of the gate, seriously jeopardizing their chances of success. Here are three common sales mistakes that get made in the first half-minute of far too many sales conversations.

Do you use social proof to help your customers see the big picture? The idea behind Social Proof is that customers are more comfortable moving beyond an objection if someone else like them has done so already. Let your customers learn from what other people have done.

Let’s start by saying that no one is interested in your excuses. No one. Ever. Harsh but true. Management cares about results not excuses. Data, yes. Facts, yes. Quantifiable explanations, yes. But never excuses. Here are the top 5 excuses killing your sales career.

Your strongest competition in sales is a mental construct in your prospect’s mind. Psychologists call it the “status quo bias” – which is the allure of doing nothing at all, because fear of loss is greater than hope for gain. Here are 3 ways to overcome the status quo bias.

Sales Leaders: first, let’s all agree that no matter what your title is, you are a coach. You are responsible for your teams development, not just directing them. With that being the case, do you know the biggest mistake managers make when coaching their teams?

​Why are we so terrified of buyer objections?  We wince, we cringe and do all we can to avoid them. But why? What’s the very worse thing that could happen? They don’t buy! As salespeople, we must learn to embrace buyer objections and recognize the benefits of confidently dealing with them.

Congratulations. You’ve begun your journey into the wonderful, scary, thrilling, ill-defined, mysterious world of sales. Here’s the bad news: ain’t nobody gonna take you by the hand and tell you how to be successful. That’s also the good news, because it is best left to you to determine how you define success. If you want the greatest chance to maximize your early results, here are three ideas to get you started.