
15 Must Read Sales Books
Julia Childs said to “find something you’re passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.” We couldn’t agree more, especially when it comes to the art of selling. As an organization focused on helping sales teams be more effective, we love big ideas and big books about sales. Here are 15 of our favorites.
Selling to Big Companies
By Jill Konrath
“Traditional sellers think that customers make decisions based on their product, service, or solution differentiators. … Today’s seller knows that their products, services, or solutions are simply tools—nothing more. They know that their customers could care less about buying new software or training their staff. They realize that customers invest in their offering because of the outcome they get. That’s why their focus is on business improvement.”
Blue Ocean Strategy
By W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
“To fundamentally shift the strategy canvas of an industry, you must begin by reorienting your strategic focus from competitors to alternatives, and from customers to non-customers of an industry. As you shift your strategic focus from current competition to alternatives and non-consumers, you gain insight into how to redefine the problem the industry focuses on and thereby reconstruct buyer value elements that reside across industry boundaries.”
Secrets of Closing the Sale
By Zig Ziglar
“It is unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing what it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot.”
The Trusted Advisor
By David H. Maister
“If trust is so important, how does one go about winning it? How do you get somebody to trust you? It is clear that it is not done by saying ‘Trust me!’ Nothing is more likely to get the listener to put up his or her defenses! The key point is that trust must be earned and deserved.”
To Sell is Human
By Daniel Pink
“A world of flat organizations and tumultuous business conditions – and that’s our world – punishes fixed skills and prizes elastic ones. What an individual does day to day on the job now must stretch across functional boundaries. Designers analyze. Analysts design. Marketers create. Creators market. And when the next technologies emerge and current business models collapse, those skills will need to stretch again in different directions.”
Mastering the Complex Sale
By Jeff Thull
“[Customer] business environments are more competitive than ever, technological advances are radically altering their industries and markets, and their margin for error is always shrinking. The increased complexity of their environment translates directly to increased complexity in the problems they need to solve.”