Five Most Essential Sales Training Books
What are the five most essential sales training books that every sales person should have read? For those in business-to-business (B2B) sales, here’s the five books that underpin all advanced sales techniques that we use today.
1. Major Account Sales Strategy – Neil Rackham
What is it? Originally published in1989, this book on sales strategy is possibly the most essential sales training books of all time.
What makes this one of the essential sales training books? This book is essential because it details the customer buying process. In order to sell effectively, you need to understand how the customer buys. People hate being sold to, but they love to buy! This book was not the first book to illustrate a customer buying process. But it was the first to detail what you need to do to drive the customer through the buying process. You cannot consider yourself a customer orientated sales person until you’ve read this book!
What’s the most important bit? Once you know the buying process that the customer goes through, you will realize that your job is no longer to sell to the customer. Rather your job is to facilitate them through their buying process. This single insight is the most important and underpinning component of modern day selling.
2. Spin Selling – Neil Rackham
What is it? Originally published in1995 SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham was a turning point in selling. Rackham researched 35,000 sales calls and came up with the SPIN methodology as the optimum way to sell. As a young sales person I used the SPIN methodology religiously and built a great career in sales as a result.
What makes this one of the essential sales training books? Because it is a very simple yet extremely effective questioning methodology. You can’t consider yourself a professional sales person if you’ve not read this book.
What’s the most important bit? Sales people are good at asking situation questions which provide no value to the customer. They should ask problem questions and follow up with implication questions to build a business case.
3. Key Account Management – Peter Cheverton
What is it? This is a book about key account management and contains many tools and frameworks to understand the customer.
What makes this one of the essential sales training books? Questioning methodologies can only take you so far. This book has tools that allow you to understand the customer at a much deeper level. If you can understand your customer more deeply, you can influence them, create more value and demonstrate the value that you create for them.
What’s the most important bit? The opportunity chain is a great tool for analyzing your customer to see where value can spread across their organization. Sales people typically only deal with one department, but we know that value travels across the whole company. If you’re trying to create a business case or demonstrate ROI, then this tool is fantastic. Cheverton also shows how decision makers relate to where the value is being created, helping you to understand the relationship between value creation and decision makers.
4. Re-thinking the sales force – John De Vincentis and Neil Rackham
What is it? This is a book about the changes that are happening to modern day sales people and sales forces across the globe.
What makes this one of the essential sales training books? With the advent of the internet, the predictions of this book concerning the redundancy of sale people are being accelerated. Every sales person needs to know how they should fit in with modern buying practices.
What’s the most important bit? Every function in the organisation, from product design to after sales service, must be focused on giving customers what they want and need. Concerning sales specifically, a sales force should not, and must not, be limited to communicating value alone. The sales force must create value during the sales process and this book gives guidance on how to do this at every stem of the buying process.
5. The truth about negotiations – Leigh Thompson
What is it? The book attempts to achieve three things: firstly to provide readers with a game plan for negotiations that works in any negotiation situation, from work to your social life or even at home. Secondly, to leverage information collected by the other party and to effectively use win-win negotiation techniques. Thirdly to prepare the reader to negotiate in real world situations that are often difficult, such as how to establish trust with someone you don’t trust or like.
What makes this one of the essential sales training books? Sales people focus on creating value, and then because of a lack of basic negotiation skills, they give some of that value away unnecessarily.
What’s the most important bit? If you are looking for basic negotiation insights then Thompson covers the fundamentals of BATNA, win-win and ZOPA in a way that is easy to understand with some good examples.
The Essential Sales Training Books
Most of these books are quite old now. It never ceases to amaze me how many sales people I’ve trained that have never heard of these books or authors. If you’ve not read them, take a look on e-bay. You can pick up a second hand copy there for pennies and it will be one of the best returns on investment you’ll ever make in your sales career.
