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 Challenger Sale
By Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
“The ability to deliver unique insight is arguably the most powerful weapon in the Challenger’s arsenal and the biggest driver of B2B customer loyalty.”
Spin Selling
By Neil Rackham
“People do not buy from salespeople because they understand their products but because they felt the salesperson understood their problems.”
How to Master the Art of Selling
By Tom Hopkins
“No one limits your growth but you. If you want to earn more, learn more. That means you’ll work harder for a while; that means you’ll work longer for a while. But you’ll be paid for your extra effort with enhanced earnings down the road.”
Selling to the C-Suite
By Nicholas A. C. Read and Stephen Bistritz
“Salespeople of the future have to actually create value, not communicate value.”
Selling the Invisible
By Harry Beckwith
“The more you can spot patterns and better understand people, the more you will succeed.”
Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play
By Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig
“If our intent is to help clients succeed, we have both the right and the obligation not to guess about the key elements of that success.”
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.”
Perfect Selling
By Linda Richardson
“Your opening can be the most human part of the call. It can be the most personal. You can be the most awkward and uncomfortable. It can also be the most gracious and fun. It can be many of these things at once. It is always telling.”
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.”
How to Win Friends and Influence People
By Dale Carnegie
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
The Little Red Book of Selling
By Jeffrey Gitomer
“The more a prospective customer clicks on you and your stuff, the easier it is for them to make a buying decision in your favor.”