July 24th, 2019 | Updated on March 9th, 2021
Why should you read sales books? Answer is: you should read sales books to improve your sales skills and master the fundamental of sales.
We have selected 25 best sales books for those who are looking for new tips and advice which can help them raise their sales games and make them a better salesperson.
1. How To Win Friends & Influence People
Dale Carnegie’s rock-solid, time-tested advice has carried countless people up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives. One of the most groundbreaking and timeless bestsellers of all time, How to Win Friends & Influence People will teach you:
- Six ways to make people like you
- Twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking
- Nine ways to change people without arousing resentment
2. Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles Of Sales Greatness
Salespeople hate to read. That’s why Little Red Book of Selling is short, sweet, and to the point. It’s packed with answers that people are searching for in order to help them make sales for the moment―and the rest of their lives.
3. New Sales. Simplified.: The Essential Handbook For Prospecting And New Business Development
Packed with examples and anecdotes, New Sales. Simplified. offers a proven formula for prospecting, developing, and closing deals.
You’ll learn how to: identify a strategic list of genuine prospects; draft a compelling, customer-focused “sales story”; perfect the proactive telephone call to get face-to-face with more prospects; use email, voicemail, and social media to your advantage; build rapport; prepare for and structure a winning sales call; stop presenting to and start dialoguing with buyers; and make time in your calendar for business development activities.
4. How To Master The Art Of Selling
Now, in this fully updated and revised edition of the million-copy seller, Hopkins shows how you can succeed in the profession of selling. Learn:
- How to create the perfect selling climate
- Specific questions and tie-downs
- Referral and non-referral prospecting
- How to “sell” the most important people you know
- Effective phone techniques
- How to finesse the first meeting
- How to handle objections and what to do when you hear the word “no”
- How to test different closes and master sixteen powerful closes
- How to plan for greatest selling impact
- And he shows you how his great selling techniques can be yours!
5. Never Be Closing: How To Sell Better Without Screwing Your Clients, Your Colleagues, Or Yourself
Speaker and consultant Tim Hurson presents 12 techniques that benefit both the seller and the client Never Be Closing expands on the principles of Tim Hurson’s first book, Think Better, to teach salespeople how to improve their strategy and sell anything to anyone using a simple, repeatable framework.
This isn’t a book full of mundane tactics for cold-calling or techniques for closing a deal. This is a problem-solving approach that is more beneficial for both the seller and the client.
6. Sales Manager Survival Guide: Lessons From Sales’ Front Lines
The definitive guide to the toughest, most challenging, and most rewarding job in sales. Front Line Sales Managers have to do it all – often without anyone showing them the ropes. In addition to making your numbers, your job calls upon you for:
- Constant coaching, training, and team building
- Call, pipeline, deal, territory, one-on-ones, and other reviews that drive business performance
- Recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding top talent
- Responding to shifts in the marketplace – and in your company
- Dealing with, turning around, or terminating problem employees
- Analyzing and acting upon metrics to correct performance
- Managing the business and executive expectations
- Leveraging sales systems, tools, and processes
- Conducting performance reviews and setting expectations
- And more
7. First, Break All The Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its revolutionary study of more than 80,000 managers in First, Break All the Rules, revealing what the world’s greatest managers do differently. With vital performance and career lessons and ideas for how to apply them, it is a must-read for managers at every level.
Gallup’s research produced the 12 simple statements that distinguish the strongest departments of a company from all the rest. First, Break All the Rules is the first book to present this essential measuring stick and to prove the link between employee opinions and productivity, profit, customer satisfaction and the rate of turnover.
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8. Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method For Presenting, Persuading, And Winning The Deal
Whether you’re selling ideas to investors, pitching a client for new business, or even negotiating for a higher salary, Pitch Anything will transform the way you position your ideas.
Pitch Anything introduces the exclusive STRONG method of pitching, which can be put to use immediately:
- Setting the Frame
- Telling the Story
- Revealing the Intrigue
- Offering the Prize
- Nailing the Hookpoint
- Getting a Decision
9. Amp Up Your Sales: Powerful Strategies That Move Customers To Make Fast, Favorable Decisions
Amp Up Your Sales will show anyone how to become the trusted sales professional who consistently wins new business. Readers will learn how to:
- Maximize the value of their selling
- Accelerate responsiveness to build trust and credibility
- Earn valuable selling time with customers
- Shape the buyer’s vision
- Integrate persuasive stories into their sales process
- Build lasting relationships through follow-up and customer service
10. Smart Calling: Eliminate the Fear, Failure, and Rejection from Cold Calling
While other books on cold calling dispense long-perpetuated myths such “prospecting is a numbers game,” and salespeople need to “love rejection,” this book will empower readers to take action, call prospects, and get a ‘yes’ every time.
Updated information reflects changes and advances in the information gathering that comprises the “smart” part of the calling
Further enhances the value and credibility of the book by including more actual examples and success stories from readers and users of the first version.
11. The Challenger Sale: Taking Control Of The Customer Conversation
Based on an exhaustive study of thousands of sales reps across multiple industries and geographies, The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions.
The authors’ study found that every sales rep in the world falls into one of five distinct profiles, and while all of these types of reps can deliver average sales performance, only one-the Challenger- delivers consistently high performance.
The things that make Challengers unique are replicable and teachable to the average sales rep. Once you understand how to identify the Challengers in your organization, you can model their approach and embed it throughout your sales force.
12. The Science Of Selling: Proven Strategies To Make Your Pitch, Influence Decisions, And Close The Deal
Blending cutting-edge research in social psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics, The Science of Selling shows you how to align the way you sell with how our brains naturally form buying decisions, dramatically increasing your ability to earn more sales.
What You Will learn:
- Engage buyers’ emotions to increase their receptiveness to you and your ideas
- Ask questions that line up with how the brain discloses information
- Lock in the incremental commitments that lead to a sale
- Create positive influence and reduce the sway of competitors
- Discover the underlying causes of objections and neutralize them
- Guide buyers through the necessary mental steps to make purchasing decisions
13. To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
To Sell Is Human offers a fresh look at the art and science of selling. As he did in Drive and A Whole New Mind, Daniel H. Pink draws on a rich trove of social science for his counterintuitive insights.
He reveals the new ABCs of moving others (it’s no longer “Always Be Closing”), explains why extraverts don’t make the best salespeople, and shows how giving people an “off-ramp” for their actions can matter more than actually changing their minds.
Along the way, Pink describes the six successors to the elevator pitch, the three rules for understanding another’s perspective, the five frames that can make your message clearer and more persuasive, and much more.
14. The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need
This book explains what all successful sellers, regardless of industry or organization, share: a mind-set of powerful beliefs and a skill-set of key actions, including…
- Self-discipline: How to keep your commitments to yourself and others.
- Accountability: How to own the outcomes you sell.
- Competitiveness: How to embrace competition rather than let it intimidate you.
- Resourcefulness: How to blend your imagination, experience, and knowledge into unique solutions.
- Storytelling: How to create deeper relationships by presenting a story in which the client is the hero and you’re their guide.
- Diagnosing: How to look below the surface to figure out someone else’s real challenges and needs.
15. Words That Sell: More Than 6000 Entries To Help You Promote Your Products, Services, And Ideas
Looking for a better way to say “authentic?” Words That Sell gives you 57 alternatives. How about “appealing?” Take your pick from 76 synonyms. You’ll even find more than 100 variations on “exciting.” Fully updated and expanded, this edition of the copywriting classic is packed with inspiration-on-demand for busy professionals who need to win customers–by mail, online, or in person.
- More than 75 lists of powerful and persuasive words and phrases, including 21 new lists for this edition
- Cross-referencing of categories to jump-start creative thinking
- A crash course in basic copywriting techniques
- Helpful lists of commonly misspelled words, confusing words, pretentious phrases to avoid, and more
16. 7l: The Seven Levels Of Communication: Go From Relationships To Referrals
(7L) The Seven Levels of Communication tells the entertaining and educational story of Rick Masters, who is suffering from a down economy when he meets a mortgage professional who has built a successful business without advertising or personal promotion.
Skeptical, he agrees to accompany her to a conference to learn more about her mysterious methods. Rick soon learns that the rewards for implementing these strategies are far greater than he had ever imagined.
In seeking success, he finds significance. This heartwarming tale of Rick’s trials and triumphs describes the exact strategies that helped him evolve from the Ego Era to the Generosity Generation.
17. Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century
Think and Grow Rich has been called the “Granddaddy of All Motivational Literature.” It was the first book to boldly ask, “What makes a winner?” The man who asked and listened for the answer, Napoleon Hill, is now counted in the top ranks of the world’s winners himself.
The most famous of all teachers of success spent “a fortune and the better part of a lifetime of effort” to produce the “Law of Success” philosophy that forms the basis of his books and that is so powerfully summarized in this one.
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18. Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What The Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and who’s more self-conscious about sex, men or women?
Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better.
All of us are touched by big data everyday, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.
19. Influence: The Psychology Of Persuasion, Revised Edition
Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say “yes”—and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book.
You’ll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader—and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of Influence will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success.
20. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss’s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, the author shares the nine effective principles—counterintuitive tactics and strategies—you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life.
21. The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies
The Ultimate Sales Machine shows you how to tune up and soup up virtually every part of your business by spending just an hour per week on each impact area you want to improve: sales, marketing, management, and more.
22. Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets To Success, One Relationship At A Time
In Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi lays out the specific steps—and inner mindset—he uses to reach out to connect with the thousands of colleagues, friends, and associates on his contacts list, people he has helped and who have helped him. And in the time since Never Eat, Alone was published in 2005, the rise of social media and new, collaborative management styles have only made Ferrazzi’s advice more essential for anyone hoping to get ahead in business.
23. The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, Updated and Expanded
In this updated and expanded version of the international bestseller The First 90 Days, Michael D. Watkins offers proven strategies for conquering the challenges of transitions—no matter where you are in your career. Watkins, a noted expert on leadership transitions and adviser to senior leaders in all types of organizations, also addresses today’s increasingly demanding professional landscape, where managers face not only more frequent transitions but also steeper expectations once they step into their new jobs.
24. Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
An inspiring guide to creativity in the digital age, Steal Like an Artist presents ten transformative principles that will help readers discover their artistic side and build a more creative life.
Nothing is original, so embrace influence, school yourself through the work of others, remix and reimagine to discover your own path. Follow interests wherever they take you—what feels like a hobby may turn into you life’s work. Forget the old cliché about writing what you know: Instead, write the book you want to read, make the movie you want to watch.
25. Hacking Sales
Hacking Sales helps you transform your sales process using the next generation of tools, tactics and strategies. Author Max Altschuler has dedicated his business to helping companies build modern, efficient, high tech sales processes that generate more revenue while using fewer resources. In this book, he shows you the most effective changes you can make, starting today, to evolve your sales and continually raise the bar.
You’ll walk through the entire sales process from start to finish, learning critical hacks every step of the way. Find and capture your lowest-hanging fruit at the top of the funnel, build massive lead lists using ICP and TAM, utilize multiple prospecting strategies, perfect your follow-ups.
26. Eat Their Lunch
Like it or not, sales is often a zero-sum game: Your win is someone else’s loss. Most salespeople work in mature, overcrowded industries, your offerings perceived (often unfairly) as commodities. Growth requires taking market share from your competitors, while they try to do the same to you. How else can you grow 12 percent a year in an industry that’s only growing by 3 percent?
It’s not easy for any salesperson to execute a competitive displacement–or, in other words, “eat their lunch.” You might think this requires a bloodthirsty “whatever it takes” attitude, but that’s the opposite of what works. If you act like a Mafia don, you only make yourself difficult to trust and impossible to see as a long-term partner. Instead, this book shows you how to find and maintain a long-term competitive advantage by taking steps like:
27. Triangle Selling
Fast growth is the name of the game for sales organizations. Long-term success hinges upon a sales team with core skills and tactical frameworks that drive repeatable results.
Regardless of existing sales methodology, market, and company size, Triangle Selling empowers salespeople, managers, and executives to quickly adopt the fundamentals necessary to fuel consistent growth within their organization, onboard effectively, and remain agile in an ever-evolving profession.
Like doctors, lawyers, and engineers who learn fundamental skills and frameworks to drive their work, this third book by industry veterans Sorey and Bray spells out, in practical language, the fundamentals of selling.
28. B2B Is Really P2P
“This is the best book on selling I’ve ever read.” Joe Calloway, Hall of fame speaker and best selling author. B2B is Really P2P is A MUST READ for every member of your sales team. Frank Somma has written a virtual step by step manual for sales managers, sales teams, business owners, and solopreneurs who want to create instant rapport, spike sales, and cement long-term customer loyalty. If closing more sales is your goal, this is your sales bible. In B2B Is Really P2P, you’ll read many of Frank’s real-life stories, about sales, negotiation, prospecting, and closing embedded with immediately actionable tools for creating rapport and understanding with virtually anyone and that means selling.
29. Spin Selling
Written by Neil Rackham, former president and founder of Huthwaite corporation, SPIN Selling is essential reading for anyone involved in selling or managing a sales force. Unquestionably the best documented account of sales success ever collected and the result of the Huthwaite corporation’s massive 12 year, $1 million dollar research into effective sales performance, this groundbreaking resource details the revolutionary SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need payoff) strategy.
In SPIN Selling, Rackham, who has advised leading companies such as IBM and Honeywell delivers the first book to specifically examine selling high value product and services. By following the simple, practical, and easy to apply techniques of SPIN, readers will be able to dramatically increase their sales volume from major accounts. Rackham answers key questions such as “What makes success in major sales” and “Why do techniques like closing work in small sales but fail in larger ones?”
30. The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team
In keeping with the parable style, Patrick Lencioni begins by telling the fable of a woman who, as CEO of a struggling Silicon Valley firm, took control of a dysfunctional executive committee and helped its members succeed as a team. Story time over, Lencioni offers explicit instructions for overcoming the human behavioral tendencies that he says corrupt teams (absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results). Succinct yet sympathetic, this guide will be a boon for those struggling with the inherent difficulties of leading a group.
31. Beat the Bots
As a salesperson, you need confidence and passion to win. But as buyers and robots continue to gain power, it’s easy to feel beaten down in a world where customers no longer seem to need you. As deals fall through and commissions dwindle, you feel desperation begin to sink in. Blow after blow, you wonder:
Anita Nielsen shows you how to get up off the mat and come out swinging. You don’t need another impractical system or framework that can easily be copied by any other sales professional. Everything you need to regain your confidence and win in this new sales landscape is already in you, waiting to be unlocked. Anita gives you the keys: a series of trench tales, high-impact questions, and a thought process that shows you how to use the power of personalized value to differentiate yourself and win better, bigger, and more.
32. The Inner Edge
In The Inner Edge, Dr. Jay offers customized coaching to help leaders overcome challenges, leverage opportunities, and maximize their talents, teams, and time. Through vivid examples, conversations with accomplished leaders, insightful perspectives on leadership, and thought-provoking questions and exercises, Jay shows readers that leadership is not just a label, but a way of life. Finding your edge, gaining clarity, focusing and taking action, expanding your knowledge―under Jay’s training these and other principles become concrete achievable assets for living and leading. The result is an essential resource for helping leaders get results for their organizations in a way that capitalizes on―and enriches―their own unique identity.
33. 80/20 Sales and Marketing
Created by famed marketing consultant and best-selling author Perry Marshall, unique tools show you exactly how much money you’re leaving on the table, and how to put it back in your pocket – then reinvest for even greater success. You’ll identify untapped markets, incremental improvements and high-profit opportunities, gaining time, and greater income potential.
34. Start with Why
START WITH WHY shows that the leaders who’ve had the greatest influence in the world all think, act, and communicate the same way — and it’s the opposite of what everyone else does. Sinek calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be led, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.
35. The New Solution Selling
he New Solution Selling expands the classic text’s cases, examples, and situations and sharpens its focus on streamlining the sales process to achieve greater success in fewer steps and a shorter time frame. Much in sales has changed in the past decade, and The New Solution Selling incorporates those changes into an integrated, tailored approach for improving both individual productivity and organizational return on investment. Written to enhance the results and careers of sales pros and managers in virtually any industry.
36. The Little Red Book of Selling
Wall Street Journal Business Best-Seller, Jeffrey Gitomer’s Little Red Book of Selling is now available! It includes Jeffrey’s 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness and strategies and answers from a lifetime of selling that will teach you how to make sales forever.
In this book, you will have the opportunity to understand why sales happen. And by mastering the elements that Jeffrey Gitomer gives you, you’ll make sales happen for yourself forever.
37. Gap Selling
Gap Selling is a game-changing book designed to raise the sales IQ of selling organizations around the world. In his unapologetic and irreverent style, Keenan breaks down the tired old sales myths causing today’s frustrating sales issues, to highlight a deceptively powerful new way to connect with buyers.
Today’s sales world is littered with glorified order takers, beholden to a frustrated buyer, unable to influence the sale and create value. Gap Selling flips the script and creates salespeople with immense influence at every stage of the buying process.
38. A Simple Guide to Technical Sales
Thinking about launching a new career or progressing in your existing career as a Field Application Engineer or a Technical Sales professional? Do you dream of a career visiting and helping engineers in multiple industries, international travel, and a great salary earned using your ever-increasing technical knowledge? If so, then this is the book for you. This book does not contain hundreds of acronyms and sales buzz words, nor is it full of details you will find in a corporate sales book. If you want a list of corporate jargon, this isn’t the book for you.
This book contains a set of hard-and-fast rules and techniques that will propel you out of your engineering comfort zone and into the exciting world of sales. If you have the engineering mentality—on or off, one or zero, black or white, binary way of thinking—this book’s direct, efficient approach is just the thing you need to learn the skills required to find success in your new career!
39. The Sales Acceleration Formula
The Sales Acceleration Formula provides a scalable, predictable approach to growing revenue and building a winning sales team. Everyone wants to build the next $100 million business and author Mark Roberge has actually done it using a unique methodology that he shares with his readers.
As an MIT alum with an engineering background, Roberge challenged the conventional methods of scaling sales utilizing the metrics-driven, process-oriented lens through which he was trained to see the world. In this book, he reveals his formulas for success. Readers will learn how to apply data, technology, and inbound selling to every aspect of accelerating sales, including hiring, training, managing, and generating demand.
40. The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media
In The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media, coauthors Curtis and Giamanco present Sales 2.0, a significant expansion from selling via the traditional face-to-face or telephone sales methods. The book begins by examining the impact of the communication revolution on sales as well as the history of selling. It contains case examples that justify incorporating social media in business. The final chapters of the book describe each social network, explain how they work, and create a road map for a social media sales strategy―including how to empower salespeople to overcome their resistance to change.
