With a focus on sales this month, we want to spend time exploring how you can use culture, storytelling, and customer experience to engage the buyer and increase sales.
Let’s concentrate on why people buy, when they spend more for a product/service, when great experiences create loyal customers, and why it’s important to stand out in a sea of average.
To that end, let’s begin by educating ourselves more on sales. Here are the 5 books on sales you should try and read this month. Pick one, two, or all of them. Leave us a note in the comments about what you plan on reading!
1. Little Red Book of Selling, by Jeffrey Gitomer
Salespeople hate to read. That’s why Little Red Book of Selling is short, sweet, and to the point. It’s packed with answers that people are searching for in order to help them make sales for the moment—and the rest of their lives.
2. SPIN Selling, by Neil Rackham
Written by Neil Rackham, former president and founder of Huthwaite corporation, SPIN Selling is essential reading for anyone involved in selling or managing a sales force. Unquestionably the best-documented account of sales success ever collected and the result of the Huthwaite corporation’s massive 12-year, $1-million dollar research into effective sales performance, this groundbreaking resource details the revolutionary SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff) strategy.
In SPIN Selling, Rackham, who has advised leading companies such as IBM and Honeywell delivers the first book to specifically examine selling high-value product and services. By following the simple, practical, and easy-to-apply techniques of SPIN, readers will be able to dramatically increase their sales volume from major accounts. Rackham answers key questions such as “What makes success in major sales” and “Why do techniques like closing work in small sales but fail in larger ones?”
You will learn why traditional sales methods which were developed for small consumer sales, just won’t work for large sales and why conventional selling methods are doomed to fail in major sales. Packed with real-world examples, illuminating graphics, and informative case studies – and backed by hard research data – SPIN Selling is the million-dollar key to understanding and producing record-breaking high-end sales performance.
3. Secrets of Closing the Sale, by Zig Ziglar
Whether presenting a product or principle, service or idea, we all engage in sales. Zig Ziglar presents winning techniques for getting a positive response and establishing dynamic relationships.
4. The Greatest Salesman in the World, by Og Mandino
What you are today is not important… for in this runaway bestseller you will learn how to change your life by applying the secrets you are about to discover in the ancient scrolls.
5. How to Master the Art of Selling, by Tom Hopkins
A revised and updated edition of How to master the art of selling, which educates on how to succeed in sales, including new information on using the latest research techniques and using e-mail and online resources to generate deals more quickly and efficiently
Note: None of the links here are Amazon Affiliate links.
What about “Masterminds Unleashed: Selling for Geniuses”. That was on my list last summer.
That’s a great book too! Have you read any on our list?