5 books every sales individual should read
We wrote about how important it was to invest in your career this year. As part of that investment, we recommended reading more books to improve your skillset. At the outset, we would like to say that there are ways you can hack reading. Videos, podcasts and audio books are just some such methods.
If you are looking for shortcuts to any of the above methods in this blog post, we are sorry you are going to be disappointed! What we do promise is that we will outline the books we recommend and what you can hope to get out of them.
Disclaimer: We make zero dollars in favour or money from recommending these books to you. This is a list curated to suit the needs of the modern day inside sales individual. All books are trademarks and property of the writers mentioned, we stake no claim to any of these titles in any way.
Farm don’t hunt
A book that outlines the fundamentals of customer success and what it means to organisations. We recommend this book if you have no idea where to start when it comes to customer success. The book also outlines the philosophy behind designing the popular customer success tool Totango.
Read this book if you want to learn expanding accounts, customer success or just need an understanding of how million-dollar deals are closed.
We have already introduced a solid primer into customer success via videos which you can find here. However, if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of customer success, this is a must read.
Hack E-mail: Email Outreach and Marketing Ideas Based on Sales Psychology
An essential book if you are a hunter or into outbound selling. The book outlines the principles of reaching out to prospects and using research to your advantage. For example, if your prospect just won an award, you might want to send an email with the subject line: congratulations on your recent award. The book does talk about one tool but if you can look past that, you should be able to take away some valuable insights.
Even if you are not into outbound selling, this book should be able to help you improve your emails to customers and prospects alike.
The Challenger series
This is not one but two books. If you have ever wondered what consultative selling is all about, then The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer are two books that you must read. We will admit they are not the easiest reads, but the effort is worth it. In the end if you can learn to implement the teachings within, you will be a better sales individual for it.
Our recommendation is to start with The Challenger Sale and then graduate to The Challenger Customer. What we don’t recommend is trying to read both in one go and one after the other. Make sure you have a pen and paper handy when you read these books. There will be a tonne of notes to take.
The Little Red Book of Selling
If you are just starting out your sales career, we recommend picking this book up before any of the above books. The book is easy to read and lays down the fundamentals of selling. If you have considerable experience in sales, you might find this book a little ‘old fashioned’ but we truly believe that this book will add something to any sales individual that reads it.
We are sure you have your list of great books you have read and we understand that each book adds something to you as a sales individual. If you have a great book you would like to recommend to us, send us a tweet to @insideselling we will be happy to review the book and add it to a future list.