Are you ready to immerse yourself in ideas that give you an advantage in your next sales conversation?
Find a book that can help you build a skill, increase your income, or reach more decision makers. We’ve compiled a GREAT list of possibilities for you to pull from in the 5th annual Summer Sales Reading List 2015
Then find yourself a nice shady spot and fill your mind with tools, tips, and techniques to help you sell more this year (and next).
The authors also have valuable websites with free resources and blog posts with relevant and timely updates and ideas. As you read through the list, don’t stop at the one link provided – visit the book or author’s websites; you never know what treasures await!
Enjoy!
Part 1 of the list can be found here: Summer Sales Reading List 2015.
The Summer Sales Reading List – All Star Book Resources by Sales Pro Insider, Inc.
3 Secrets to Increase Sales with Existing Customers
by Lisa Magnuson
If you have existing customers that you can’t afford to lose, then this eBook is for you. You will learn the necessary fundamentals to retaining your largest clients. The book also reveals the secrets to growing those top line accounts over time.
360 Degrees of the Customer: Strategies & Tactics for Marketing, Sales and Service
by Lisa Dennis, Chuck Dennis and Lori Richardson
Marketing, Sales and Customer Service are three disciplines that all overlap at the same point; the customer. All customers touch points should be integrated with each other, a theory that makes perfect sense in the abstract, but really hard to execute in reality. This book presents some common sense strategies and tactics to help your business keep the customer promise.
52 Timely Tips for Sales Managers
by Nancy Bleeke
Practical, results-producing ideas. Nancy shares a year’s worth of sales-maximizing ideas for you to implement as a sales manager.
Are You Ready to Increase Your Sales by 15-25%? These proven actions will drive performance and productivity, leading to increased sales!
A Sample Tip from 52 Timely Tips for Sales Managers
#24 Set expectations
Define the height of the “bar” and communicate the expectations. Don’t let the “Law of Limited Performance”, as author Ron Willingham calls it, minimize capabilities. The Law states that “Salespeople will soon discover the level of performance their manager expects and perform to that level. Managers then believe that is all the salesperson is capable of producing and quit challenging them to do more. Both reinforce what the other believes.” How much productivity is left untapped by people obeying this “law”? Review how this law might be in effect within your team and then realistically raise your belief, expectations and the “bar”.
52 Timely Tips for Sales Professionals
by Nancy Bleeke and Lynn Zimmer
Bleeke and Zimmer have been on the frontline of sales for a combined total of more than 45 years. In this book, they share short and actionable tips that provide you with specific ways to increase your sales today and tomorrow.
Sample tip from 52 Timely Tips for Sales Professionals:
#9 Break Performance Paradigms!
A paradigm is a boundary or barrier. Each person has a belief boundary about his or her own possible level of performance. Stretch your boundary by finding successes outside your current boundary level. Once stretched, like a rubber band, the performance will never go back to where it once was. The new performance paradigm will lead to higher performance results!
AGILE SELLING
by Jill Konrath
So much to learn. So little time. If you’re like most sellers, your head is spinning with all the new things you have to deal with: new products and services, new technology, new positions or new competitors. Then, when you throw in all the changes going on around you, life gets even more complex.
In AGILE SELLING, you’ll discover how to:
- Rapidly absorb new information
- Master new sales skills quickly
- Leverage an agile mindset
- Tap into crucial success habits.
In a world of continuous change, your learning agility is the key for getting up to speed quickly — and then, staying there.
Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors that Drive Effective Selling
by Frank V. Cespedes
That gap between your company’s sales efforts and strategy? It’s real-and a huge vulnerability. Addressing that gap is the focus of this new book from HBS Professor Frank Cespedes.
Named “the best sales book of the year” by Strategy + Business magazine – Aligning Strategy and Sales offers a road map to articulate strategy in ways that people in the field can understand and that will fuel the behaviors required for profitable growth.
With thoughtful, clear, and engaging examples, Cespedes provides a framework for diagnosing and managing the core levers available for effective selling in any organization.
Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know About the Game of Baseball
by Dave Kurlan
If you want an easier way to differentiate yourself, your offerings and your company, while learning the new way to sell, Baseline Selling will deliver. Complete with tactics, strategies, scripts, and examples, this memorable and entertaining book will be easy to apply and one of the best sales/summer reads ever.
Changing the Sales Conversation
by Linda Richardson
Today you face a new buyer. Buyers are focused on business outcomes and proof of value. They turn to peers and social networks to self-educate before turning to salespeople. To engage them you must demonstrate that you know their world and that you are prepared with insights and ideas to add to what they already know. Richardson gives you five clear strategies and a set of tools to help you succeed in this challenging world of sales. You will learn:
- Futuring to prepare for and anticipate customer needs by building your industry, company and customer expertise
- Heat-mapping to use insight-led questions to raise the visibility of customers’ priority business challenges to focus and engage them
- Value-tracking to connect your solutions to business outcomes and proof of value
- Phasing to use sales process to align with your customer’s buying journey, self-coach, and forecast more accurately to close deals
- Linking to build heart and trust into your sales conversations
Coaching Salespeople Into Sales Champions
by Keith Rosen
The #1 Sales Coaching and Management book on Amazon 5 years in a row. When managers effectively coach their people around best practices and the inner game of coaching that develops the champion attitude, it makes your training stick. With Keith Rosen’s coaching methodology and proven L.E.A.D.S. Coaching Framework™ used by the world’s top organizations, you’ll get your sales and management teams to perform better – fast.
Conversations That Sell
by Nancy Bleeke
There’s no such thing as “small talk.” Today’s buyers want more from sales professionals than a simple consultation. What they’re hungry for are meaningful, collaborative conversations that value their time and energy and result in a Win3…where they, the seller, and the organization achieve a winning outcome.
Conversations That Sell introduces sales professionals to the collaborative conversation skills they need to capture the buyer’s attention and secure business. Outlined and supported with examples are the key conversation “Skill and Will” factors that drive results. It’s an easy read with many tips and tools to help you make each of your sales conversations count.
DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected
by Deb Calvert
You can’t advance the sale unless you can do these three things for buyers: build trust, create value and collaboratively design highly personalized solutions. This book teaches you how to do all three simultaneously! Using DISCOVER Questions®, you will become the ONE seller that buyers actually WANT to talk to.
4 Success Drivers You Need to Know...and Grow
TRAINING REPLAY
How do you strengthen this "Will" among your sales associates? How does the lack of drive impact your daily life? I discussed this and so much more on a recent virtual training event you can access below. It's valuable information for any business leader who needs to maximize performance of their people to grow their company.
Click here to access the replay.
