Sales Bibliography

Every week someone asks me what my favorite book on sales and selling is. The answer is, it depends on the context.

There are many different categories of books on selling and I have favorites in each. Here they are with comments. And please understand, it's just one man's opinion and I haven't read everything. It should also be noted, that the following books are not to be read by someone in sales. They are to be lived with and p-r-a-c-t-i-c-e-d for years to be truly understood, appreciated, and valued.

Textbook

Gerald L. Manning and Barry L. Reece
Selling Today—Building Quality Partnerships

The best overall textbook covering the entire field of sales and selling. If you are in the profession and haven't read it, you should. It covers the field.

Blocking and Tackling - the fundamentals of sales and selling psychology and techniques.

Brian Tracy
The Psychology of Selling and
Advanced Selling Strategies

Together, these two books by Tracy form a really excellent primer on the basics of selling attitudes and techniques—without a lot of the hype found in some other popular works. There is absolutely nothing here that you have not heard and seen somewhere else, but Tracy packages it all up so well. Originality be damned. This is very good stuff.

Customer centered selling (Consultative selling)

Mack Hanan
Consultative Selling

I don't know if he invented it as claimed, but Mack Hanan was the first one to put between two covers a selling methodology that demonstrated true value to the customer—in 1970 yet, the "dark ages."

A Selling System

(I can't choose between the following. Miller-Heiman and Neil Rackham have had a profound influence everywhere that people sell with intelligence.)

Robert Miller, Stephen Heiman, and Tad Tuleja
Conceptual Selling and
Strategic Selling

It's not strategic, it's advanced tactical but it's great stuff. This was the first and remains one of the best "cosmologies" ever written on selling. A complete workable "system" for business to business selling.

Neil Rackham
SPIN Selling and
The SPIN Selling Fieldbook

This book clarifies the customer questioning process and systematizes selling and teaching approaches that help understand customer pain and recovery.

Major Account Selling

Neil Rackham
Major Account Sales Strategy

It's not strategy either but it's still the best system ever published on Major Account Selling. Neil Rackham is the only author to make the list in two categories.

Marketing books that must be read by every high tech sales, marketing or customer service person.

Theodore Levitt
The Marketing Imagination

Said by many to be the best book ever written on marketing.

Bill Davidow
Marketing High Technology

This book opened my eyes to what great technology sales and marketing was all about. A real education after I had seen all of the mistakes he warns about made at Kaypro in the early and mid 80's. Who's Kaypro?

Geoffrey Moore
Crossing the Chasm

If every salesperson went in front of customers every day with the information and customer savvy that this book systematizes, there would be a lot less complaints registered against salespeople who don't know what they're talking about or who they're talking to. A seminal work for technology selling.

Regis McKenna
Relationship Marketing

This is the definitive work by one of the great pathfinders of high tech marketing.

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Sales bibliography