Selling isn’t easy. However, sales is one of the key skills that every entrepreneur must master to grow a successful business. From solving problems, asking good questions, to remaining persistent, building trust and answering sales objections, there are key insights that can accelerate your sales potential.
If you’re looking for the best tips on how to increase sales and become a better salesperson, here are nine sales books that every entrepreneur should read:
1. SPIN Selling
By Neil Rackham — Learn why traditional sales methods, 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 can help entrepreneurs better understand and produce record-breaking high-end sales performance.
2. Secrets of Closing the Sale
By Zig Ziglar — Ziglar shares key insights including the fact that all sales people experience objections, and savvy salespeople responds to objections with a guide mentality, leading prospects towards solutions. Whether your company sells products or services, Ziglar provides key information on closing, even the most difficult, sales.
3. What Great Salespeople Do
By Mike Bosworth — Bosworth delivers a fast-paced, easy-to-read approach to selling. By uncovering truths and insights that elude most, Bosworth shares tips on selling skills and training on selling with insights, findings, research, and skills used in various industries. Bosworth’s accessible and conversational approach makes this a must-read for entrepreneurs that are new to sales.
4. How To Win Friends and Influence People
By Dale Carnegie — Carnegie’s timeless insights are revealed and widely-accepted as one of the best known motivational books in history. Carnegie believed, financial success is attributed 15 percent to professional knowledge and 85 percent to “the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people.” How to Win Friends and Influence People shares practical skills through underlying principles of dealing with people so that they feel important and appreciated. In this book you’ll learn how to make people like you, win people over to your way of thinking, and change people without offense.
5. Guerrilla Selling
By Orvel Ray Wilson, William K Gallagher and Jay Conrad Levinson – The authors have designed this book for those who don’t like to sell, but must. Today’s increasingly competitive business environment requires new skills and commitment from salespeople. This book aims to present unconventional selling tips that are easy, and exciting for entrepreneurs at every level.
6. Selling 101: What Every Successful Sales Professional Needs to Know
By Zig Ziglar — In a short and concise format Ziglar reveals the basics of how to persuade more people more effectively, more ethically, and more often. Ziglar draws from his selling experiences and shows that while the fundamentals of selling may remain constant, sales people must continue learning, living, and looking: learning from the past without living there; living in the present by seizing each vital moment of every single day; and looking to the future with hope, optimism, and education.
7. Advanced Selling Strategies
By Brian Tracy – Tracy shares the strategy, tactics, and mental preparedness that drives superior salespeople. Drawing on his own successful sales career and extensive experience as a sales consultant and seminar leader, Brian Tracy has developed a comprehensive and effective approach to selling.
8. The Sales Bible: The Ultimate Sales Resource
By Jeffrey Gitomer — Gitomer aims to help salespeople reach their potential and close the big deal. By giving sales professionals the right answers to the toughest questions, Gitomer explores tough sales issues that include: how to make sales in any economic environment, ways to get that most-elusive appointment, top-down selling, how to fill the sales pipeline with prospects ready to buy and how to use the right questions to make more sales in less time.
9. The Go-Getter: A Story That Tells You How to be One
By Peter B. Kyne — This classic motivational parable shows you how to make your own opportunities in life. Ever since its first printing by William Randolph Hearst in 1921, The Go-Getter has inspired entrepreneurs to take initiative, increase productivity, and excel against the odds. By applying timeless lessons in any easy read, entrepreneurs at all levels can learn to rekindle the go-getter in themselves.
[Editor’s Note: This post was originally featured on YSF Magazine]
