Best Selling Sales Books

Finding shortcuts to cut down on the learning curve of your sales team is an important element of a successful sales organization. Identifying a few expertly written books to share with your team will offer you all the benefits of personal experience quickly and directly.

If you’re looking for some sure bets that cover the basics of sales, here’s a list we consider to be the top 15:

The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need by Anthony Iannarino
The New Strategy Selling by Robert B. Miller, Stephen E. Heiman and Tad Tuleja
Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port
Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount
SNAP Selling by Jill Konrath
The Sales Magnet by Kendra Lee
Spin Selling by Neil Rackham
Agile Selling by Jill Konrath

The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffreey Gitomer

Insight Selling by Mike Schultz and John E. Doerr
The Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffreey Gitomer
New Sales. Simplified. by Mike Weinber
To Sell is Human. by Daniel H. Pink
The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Rroberge
Secrets of Closing the Sales by Zig Ziglar
Inbound Selling by Brian Signorelli

In addition to these general sales books, you’ll find other valuable reads in these specific sales related categories:

Behavioral Psychology and Persuasion

Emotional Intelligence for Sales Success by Colleen Stanley
DISCOVER Questions by Deb Calvert and Renee Calvert
Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

Entrepreneurial and Sales Mindset

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
More Sales, Less Time by Jill Konrath
Drop the Ball by Tiffany Dufu

Business and Sales Management

Shark Tales by Barbara Corcoran
Leapfrog by Nathalie Molina Niño
Cracking the Sales Management Code by Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana

How to succeed in sales

While these books can give you a huge head start on the sales journey, there are many factors to successful selling. It’s universally agreed that there are 4 top principles to consider.

Know your customers: You need to research the marketplace and your customer, of course. Even more importantly, you need to experience your customers’ products and services. All the reading and research in the world won’t match actually experiencing your customers’ products and services.
Know your products: It’s imperative that you understand the features and functionality of the products you’re selling: This can be especially challenging as the product you’re selling may evolve over the course of the sales cycle. Don’t rely on others in your organization to explain the value of your product to your customer. You must have this knowledge and the ability to expertly explain the features, benefits, and unique advantages of your product.
Know how your products can become solutions to your customers’ needs: It’s not up to your customer to connect the dots for you. You need to be able to articulate how your product delivers solutions to real business problems. Often this means being able to provide relevant case studies and success stories at the right time and in the right words.
Build and nurture strong, long-term relationships.

We encourage you to read anything and everything you can get your hands on about these 4 principles.

What are the challenges of selling?

There’s no denying, complex selling entails many formidable challenges. Here are just a few.

First, enterprise sales cycles are nearly always lengthy, from many months to oftentimes more than a year.
Second, the discovery process is far more complicated and involved than that required for a smaller, transactional sale.
Third, the requirement for social proof and projected ROI is far more important in enterprise selling than in transactional selling.
Fourth, things change! Over the course of a lengthy enterprise sales cycle, the customer’s business, its decision-makers, the external business environment, your products, your pricing, your sales team and the positioning of your competitors may change, all with the potential to impact the outcome of your enterprise sales efforts.
Fifth, enterprise selling almost always means multiple decision-makers and often the very real and active presence of office politics. It can be challenging to identify key influencers from the outside and then win their support. Sixth, once you do identify the right players, you may have just one shot to secure their interest, their support, and their business.

What is sales enablement?

Just like reading books about sales can help you and your team, there are other tools to help ensure your team is meeting their potential. Sales enablement means equipping sellers with the right resources to shorten the sales cycle, increase win rates, and sign bigger deals. Sales enablement, as a function, evolved in response to the evolution of the enterprise buyer. With a wealth of information available online, enterprise buyers are in more control of the buying process than ever before. In many cases, buyers can be more than halfway through their journey before they reach out to a seller.

What does this mean? It means that sellers must take the initiative to reach out to buyers, winning the buyers’ attention much earlier in their journey. This is a task typically associated with marketing. So, sellers need to think more like marketers, and marketers need to think more like sellers – about the day-to-day experiences of buying and selling.

Sales enablement is providing customer insights, content and coaching to your sales team throughout the selling process. Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers.

Ultimately, the goal of sales enablement is to align the interdependent elements of sales, marketing, customer support, product management, legal, brand management and human resources to boost seller productivity and improve the buyer experience. In a nutshell, sales enablement strategy should provide salespeople with what they need to successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process.

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