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Use these 5 simple steps to win back a customer who has jumped ship to another vendor.

If your personal beliefs don't mesh with a company's corporate culture, you're destined to fail. On Wednesday, the Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith resigned his job by writing a scathing op-ed in the New York Times . In that column, written as an exit letter, he accuses top management of encouraging predatory sales practices that actively hurt customers: "I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients

Here's how--and why it will even improve shareholder value.

Whether youre pitching a product, an investment, or an idea, these questions will help you seal the deal without any fancy sales pitches or techniques. Convincing other parties to buy into your viewpoint is critical to growing your business.

OneID 's team knows that logging in to site after site is a pain for users--and as a sequence of high-tech hacks have shown, passwords are generally insecure. Which is why OneID's proposing a new tech "next-generation digital identity service" to neatly scoot around both of these issues.

A formulaic approach to building a prospect list will help you decide quickly whether a new business has enough potential for growth. Before investing in a new business , or expanding your current business into a new market, it helps to address several questions in order to gain a clear picture of the right business model to pursue. The first involves developing a well-tuned sense of your target customer .

Before you rush to defend yourself or fight back remember to put yourself in your customer's shoes. Customer complaints are inevitable. If you run a business that sells to the public no matter how great your goods or services are the old adage will eventually be proven true: You cannot please 100% of the people 100% of the time

You'll sell more if you make closing a natural part of your conversation with the customer. There comes a time in every sales conversation when you've got to "ask for the business." For many people—including those who sell for a living—closing is scary

As announced this week, the new Apple TV brings a new UI, better internal specs, and full HD capability to the table. But there's the business equivalent of an Easter egg hidden in it for Netflix subscribers: From now on, if you want to join Netflix you can do it through your Apple TV, and Apple handles the payments via its iTunes back channel. Essentially it works like this: The Apple TV functionality hinges on your iTunes user account, the same kind that's powered 25 billion app downloads to date

Your words help you build relationships with customers--so choose them carefully. Awesome photos, catchy videos, and fancy graphics are helpful, but the most important thing where sales are concerned are the words you use

Getting customer feedback is essential in the early stages of your company--but it's what you do with it that determines your fate. Note: A version of this post first appeared on steveblank.com . The art of entrepreneurship and the science of Customer Development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers

It's not all about you; it's all about them. Tara Hunt of Buyosphere and Lauren Thom of Fleurty Girl show how to really make an impression on your clients

If you haven't mastered these simple sales skills, you won't be able to sell at the highest level.

Stop judging & start listening: Senior execs can learn something valuable from their youngest employees. This is part of a 2-part series.

Stop judging & start listening: Senior execs can learn something valuable from their youngest employees. This is part of a 2-part series. Read the companion post: 8 Old-School Rules for Gen Y