It’s almost July, which means it’s time to start working on your summer reading list. There’s no time like the present to expand your professional skill set, and who better to learn from than experts in your industry?
Sales Coach World reached out to sales experts and asked them what sales books they would recommend to reps. The company then visualized the responses as an interconnected map:
Click the image to enlarge:
You can see the full infographic here.
There are quite a few books on the list -- 77 books from 33 experts, to be exact. And we know you’re busy. So we chose five of the most highly recommended books on the list and did a little reading of our own. Check out some of our favorite quotes below, and click to tweet!
The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
1) "How you sell has become more important than what you sell." 
2) "Customers want to talk about their business, not your solution."
3) "The best sales conversations present the customer with a compelling story about their business first, teach them something new, and then lead to their differentiators."
4) "What sets the best suppliers apart is not the quality of their products, but the value of their insight -- new ideas to help customers either make money or save money in ways they didn’t even know were possible."
5) "Challengers win not by understanding their customers’ world as well as the customers know it themselves, but by actually knowing their customers’ world better than their customers know it themselves, teaching them what they don’t know but should."
SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham
6) "Successful sellers never push the customer beyond achievable limits."
7) "My objective is not to close the sale but to open a relationship."
8) "If you can get the customer to tell you the ways in which your solution will help, then you don’t invite objections. Customers react more positively if they are treated as the experts."
9) "Skilled people receive fewer objections because they have learned objection prevention, not objection handling."
10) "Success is constructed from those important little building blocks called behaviors. More than anything else, it’s the hundreds of minute behavioral details in a call that will decide whether it succeeds."
Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig
11) "People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care."
12) "The better you understand what the client wants and needs, the better the choices you can bring to the table. It is your own best interest to focus on the interest of the client first."
13) "Helping clients succeed not only feels better, it is tremendously more effective. It is a powerful, if paradoxical, means of getting what we want."
14) "Top professionals have the ability to 'move off the solution.' They withhold offering a solution until they have intelligently explored the problems to be solved and/or the results to be achieved."
Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar
15) "Remember, when a person brings up a logical objection you answer emotionally, and when he brings up an emotional objection you answer it logically."
16) "You make the sale when the prospect understands that it will cost more to do nothing about the problem than to do something about it."
17) "Logic makes people think, but it is emotion that makes them act."
18) "Persuade by asking questions which lead the prospect to a conclusion which demands he take action, because it becomes an idea which he originated."
19) "You can get everything in life you want if you just help enough other people get what they want."
The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge
20) "A modern demand generation strategy means less focus on interruptive outbound marketing and more focus on inbound marketing."
21) "The best-trained salespeople have experienced the day-to-day job of their potential customers."
22) "Great salespeople never need to apply for a job. Finding great salespeople requires a passive recruiting strategy."
23) "Prioritize prospecting by engagement, not call cadence or alphabetical order."
24) "Historically, sales technology has been built for the sales leader, not the salesperson. Strive to adopt sales technology that enables better buying for customers and faster selling for salespeople."
New Sales Simplified by Mike Weinberg
25) "Salespeople excel because they figure out how to win business and then replicate their behavior over and over. Even the best talent will fall if too much time is wasted attacking the wrong targets."
26) "Pursue prospects that look, feel, and smell like our very best clients. We know we bring value to the equation. We have instant credibility. Our story is relevant and we have happy clients to prove it."
27) "The best intentions, target account lists, and powerful sales weapons are useless if we never launch the attack."
28) "Only salespeople that dedicate blocks of time on their calendar for prospecting consistently succeed at acquiring new business."
29) "When charged with developing new business from new accounts, our job is to engage with potential customers to determine if what we sell aligns with what these prospects need. It’s that simple."
What are your favorite sales books? Let us know in the comments below.
