Tuning into people and understanding their thinking, feelings and motivation helps you quickly build relationships and puts you at an advantage in selling, influencing and leading as well as vastly improving your coaching style and skills. Use these ten tips to very quickly understand what makes people tick.

I have been consulting with a lot of sales managers and business owners who need and want sales training, but they are concerned that the training might be wasted on some of their sales reps (sometimes as much as one-third of their team) because this portion of the reps are either resistant, or simply unmotivated.

"Why should I spend the money if one-third of my sales reps are going to tune out?"  They ask me.

It is widely thought that salespeople only work flat out if they can expect good bonuses and commission payments. Nowadays, however, many psychologists take the opposite viewpoint: incentives are not as attractive as their proponents maintain. Quite the contrary: psychologically incorrect incentive systems are more likely to be harmful.

Sales force motivation is pivotal to sales success and is a core subject any good management course. Recent psychological investigations yielded the following results:

In the majority of cases, you need to be a real "people person" if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur. If you own or run a business, you need to be able to interact with people of all shapes and sizes, personality types and origins, if you are to do well in the cutthroat business world of today.