Top 20 Sales Books for a Sales 2.0 World

Thursday, 18 February 2010 12:34

By Nigel Edelshain, Sales 2.0

It’s a question I’ve been asked a lot over the last few years. “What are the best sales books?"

Here’s my top 20 sales books somewhat in order (putting them in order is super-tough for me as it’s like choosing between children but I took my best shot).

If there’s enough interest I’ll dig down into individual reviews of each book in future post (or at least say the top 5 or 10). Let me know via the comments if you fancy that.

Keep in mind this is my personal list (no panel of judges here - maybe for another list later on). All these puppies are on my bookshelf and are well dog-eared. But there are still tons of sales books I have not read so this list can, and no doubt will, change.

You’ll notice on this list some books that people might say are not sales books. But in my opinion Sales 2.0 is about integrating marketing and networking with traditional sales. Smart Sales 2.0 people need to know the latest marketing and networking approaches as well as traditional sales approaches.

Best Sales Books

#	Book	Author	My Comments
1	Selling to Big Companies	Jill Konrath	Fessing up still my all-time favorite book. The best book ever on prospecting, which is my focus in the world. One book, one dessert island. I'd take this one.
2	Sales 2.0	Anneke Seley	Anneke covers all the strategic stuff on Sales 2.0. Get the big picture on Sales 2.0 in one spot. Great Sales 2.0 case studies in here also. Anneke rocks!
3	Inbound Marketing	Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah	Yes, marketing book but Inbound Marketing and Sales 2.0 must cohabitate. Hugely important to know about inbound marketing.
4	The Power to Get In	Michael Boylan	Bit of a sleeper this one but there's a critical idea in here: use leverage when trying to crack into an account
5	The New Rules of Marketing & PR	David Meerman Scott	Marketing again. The man who first saw how the Web radically changes the lead generation game. Must-read.
6	Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty	Harvey Mackay	Networking. Yes networking is critical to selling. Classic on networking. One of the basic texts that inspired my view of "Social Calling".
7	Lead Generation for the Complex Sale	Brian Carroll	Brian covers all the bases on how to generate leads. Will definitely give you ideas.
8	Getting Things Done	David Allen	Time Management classic. In the end sales people need to be great time managers. This is The book to have on time management.
9	Book Yourself Solid	Michael Port	Written for entrepreneurs but brings together sales and marketing brilliantly. Sales people must have
10	Selling to Zebras	Jeff Koser & Chad Koser	Want to know how to define your prospect profile clearly? This is the resource.
11	The New Strategic Selling	Robert Miller & Stephen Heiman	The best framework bar-none for progressing your deals from leads to closure is in this book.
12	Selling to VITO	Anthony Parinello	How to gain access to CxO's offices with a letter and a call. Letters still work to get you in. Get the scoop on sales letters here.
13	SPIN Selling	Neil Rackham	How to ask great questions in a sales meeting. The best framework out there for questioning. My favorite thing? Neil did tons of research to come up with this system - totally rare in sales today.
14	Never Cold Call Again	Frank Rumbauskas	Frank nails the fact that sales people today need to be great marketers. He shows you a bunch of practical ways to get that done.
15	Business by Referral	Ivan Misner	A ton of ideas on how to generate referrals, including a bunch of templates and scripts to use. Great workbook.
16	Solution Selling	Michael Bosworth	Classic on how to run sales meetings and progress deals. If you've not read it, you should. You may need to choose SPIN vs Solution but worth reading both.
17	Smart Networking	Liz Lynch	Networking is key to the new way to sell. Liz gives you all the tools on how to network today in this new classic.
18	No More Cold Calling	Joanne Black	Referrals, referrals. Joanne gives you the scoop on how to grow your revenue the right way.
19	Get Content. Get Customers	Joe Pulizzi	A great book about content creation. As I said sales people need to be marketers and marketers today must generate great content.
20	Million Dollar a Year Sales Income	Paul McCord	Referrals again. Paul tales you step-by-step through a great system to get more referrals from your clients.

Note: all the book titles are linked to Amazon if you feel you must purchase one right away. This list is only printed books by the way. I’ll take a shot at the best electronic resources for sales one day, if there’s interest in that too

What's missing from this list? What should be booted off the top 20? What do you think?