Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Here's how a banker will cut to the chase -- and decide if your company is worth taking a risk on. I have a friend in the baseball business who used to value players. He could take a player’s statistics, compare them to other similar players, and help his clients (the baseball clubs) come up with a value range for the player.

To a large extent, your belief system determines your success. See which beliefs to cherish--& which you should avoid. What you believe about yourself determines your level of success

Do you attend a lot of boring meetings?

Conventional 'wisdom' about selling is frequently dead wrong. Here's a reality check. The business world is full of conventional wisdom that gets passed from office to office

A shortlist of the top three most useful, innovative and interesting social platforms today. Every day, new and exciting platforms emerge for distributing great ideas, products and answers, and the boundaries keep getting pushed further out each year

Drowning in a PowerPoint swamp?

Use these 4 smart tricks to create and share customer testimonials. Nothing sells your product or service better than a passionate customer. Strong customer testimonials break the ice with prospects on the fence.

All customers ask the same questions--of themselves & of you--in this exact order. If you want to sell more, be prepared to answer them.

Go ahead.

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day.

A former fighter pilot explains how to use military discipline to increase your sales figures. There are real similarities between flying combat missions and going on sales calls, according to former fighter pilot Rob "Waldo" Wingman , author of the bestseller Never Fly Solo: Lead with Courage, Build Trusting Partnerships, and Reach New Heights in Business . As he explained it to me a while back: "Both jobs require short-term mission success and long-term victory, both require specialized training, and both demand an ability to perform under stress." Here are Wingman's 10 steps for "flying" your next sales "mission." Phase 1: Preparation 1.

What you think is an elevator pitch will actually alienate customers. Instead, have a conversation that creates a real sales opportunity. If you're like most entrepreneurs, you think an "elevator pitch" is a one- to three-minute sales pitch that you could presumably give during a very long elevator ride

Bruce Eckfeldt of Cyrus Innovation and David Harouche of Multimedia Plus share their internal strategy Two Inc. 5000 CEOs, David Harouche of Multimedia Plus and Bruce Eckfeldt of Cyrus Innovation , shared their strategies for transforming their business models with an audience of Greater New York area business owners and executives. Held at Inc.

If you blow it at a face-to-face meeting, you'll have wasted both your time & your client's. Avoid these goofs to turn more prospects into paying customers. Customer visits are expensive–and if you don't make a sale, your time and travel expense has been wasted

Is your product or service a coveted diamond or a chunk of coal?