Dr. Duane Lakin is a psychologist and business consultant. A graduate of the University of Minnesota, Duane has over thirty years of experience serving business leaders as an industrial psychologist. Prior to that, he was a clinical psychologist and school consultant.

In talking with business people from many industries, he realized that the skills used to gain rapport and influence people in the practice of applied psychology are very similar to those skills needed to sell yourself and be persuasive in business. As a result, he has dedicated himself to refining and teaching the practical applications of NLP (neurolinguistic programming) to sales and management professionals.

Since the mid-1980s, he has been looking at ways to make NLP useful to sales people. Sales representatives have told him clearly that they are not interested in touchy-feely theories or complex analytical approaches to selling. Having worked for three decades in the business arena as a contributor to the hiring process for sales people, managers, and executives, he has seen ample proof that selling is hard enough without making it more difficult.

At the same time, he has discovered that few sales people are trained in how to sell themselves and how to use language to increase their effectiveness. As a result, he has seen remarkable sales increases resulting from brief sales-training workshop experiences.