Outbound Sales, No Fluff: Written by two millennials who have actually sold something this decade.


Rex Biberston - 2017
    In the past 30 years, there has been an incredible amount of research and growth in the sales profession to help modern sales professionals better serve their customers. However, after reading Rory Vaden's New York Times Bestseller "Take The Stairs" and learning that "95% of all books that are purchased are never completely read" and "70% of all books ever purchased are never even opened" we wanted to write a book that everyone could read and take action on immediately.This book is a step-by-step guide for the modern sales professional. We want to give you the framework, knowledge, and skills to fill a sales pipeline with highly qualified opportunities. It's all practical advice - no cutesy stories, no rants, and no product pitches.There are really only two ways to fill a funnel: inbound leads or outbound prospecting. We focus this book exclusively on outbound prospecting, because it's the half of the formula that an individual sales rep can control (that's why so many sales job descriptions include the phrase "we're looking for a hunter").

Hacking Sales: The Playbook for Building a High Velocity Sales Machine


Max Altschuler - 2015
    However, only a handful of colleges offer degrees in sales and most MBA programs don’t offer a single sales class. Business executives and investors have realized that a good sales team will make or break your business. As data and technology become cheaper to access, and more Well-educated people choose careers in sales; the world of sales is undergoing a massive transformation. Consider this book your degree in modern sales. I call it Sales Hacking. In Hacking Sales, you’ll learn how to build a fully streamlined sales engine using new technology built for salespeople along with innovative new techniques. I showcase over 150 tools throughout the book, as we walk through the processes behind building an fully efficient sales machine. Some of them include: -Building your Ideal Customer Profile -Finding theses Ideal Customers by the thousands -Getting Contact Info at Scale -Different Strategies for Targeting Prospects -How to Properly Segment Lists for Mass Emailing -Building, Testing, Measuring, Optimizing Email Campaigns -Hiring, Training, Managing Outsourced Sales Development Teams -Best Practices for Nurturing Leads -Negotiations, Objections, and Closing the Deal -The Art of Getting Referrals During the Honeymoon Period -Plus Bonus Material and Much More

Selling to the C-Suite: What Every Executive Wants You to Know about Successfully Selling to the Top


Nicholas A.C. Read - 2009
    Selling to the C-Suite is the first book that reveals how to land those career-making sales in the words of CEOs themselves!With 60 years of combined experience selling to corporations around the world, Nicholas A.C. Read and Stephen J. Bistritz, Ed.D., conducted in-depth interviews with executive- level decision makers of more than 500 organizations. One thing they learned might surprise you: leaders at the highest corporate levels don't avoid sales pitches; in fact, they welcome them--provided the salesperson approaches them the right way. Inside this invaluable book, CEOs reveal exactly which sales techniques they find most effective, as well as those you should avoid.Selling to the C-Suite provides all the insight you need to:Gain access to executivesEstablish trust and credibilityLeverage relationshipsCreate value at the executive levelIt also reveals when executives personally enter the buying process and sheds light on what role they play.Selling to the C-Suite provides field-tested techniques to put you well ahead of thecompetition when it comes to making those multimillion-dollar sales you never thought possible.

Ultimate Sales Machine


Chet Holmes - 2007
    And his advice starts with one simple concept: focus! Instead of trying to master four thousand strategies to improve your business, zero in on the few essential skill areas that make the big difference. Too many managers jump at every new trend, but don’t stick with any of them. Instead, says Holmes, focus on twelve critical areas of improvement—one at a time—and practice them over and over with pigheaded discipline. 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. Like a tennis player who hits nothing but backhands for a few hours a week to perfect his game, you can systematically improve each key area. Holmes offers proven strategies for: • Management: Teach your people how to work smarter, not harder • Marketing: Get more bang from your Web site, advertising, trade shows, and public relations • Sales: Perfect every sales interaction by working on sales, not just in sales The Ultimate Sales Machine will put you and your company on a path to success and help you stay there!

Sales Truth: Debunk the Myths. Apply Powerful Principles. Win More New Sales.


Mike Weinberg - 2019
    However, ironically, the more modern solutions you adopt, the harder it is to get results.In?Sales Truth, bestselling author Mike Weinberg offers a wake-up call to salespeople and sales leaders on how to bypass the noise so you can start winning more new sales. Some truths you’ll learn include:Many self-proclaimed sales experts lack clients, credibility, and a track record of helping sellers achieve breakthrough results. The number of “likes” a sales improvement article receives is often inversely proportional to its accuracy or helpfulness to a seller or sales team. What has worked exceedingly well in sales and sales management for the past couple of decades is still the (not so) secret to sales success today. Weinberg brings sanity back to the sales table by sharing proven strategies that works firsthand for sales team in several, diverse industries around the globe. Look no further than Weinberg’s powerful principles to help you become a professional sales master and create more new sales opportunities.

The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation


Matthew Dixon - 2011
    The best salespeople don't just build relationships with customers. They challenge them. The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades.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.Instead of bludgeoning customers with endless facts and features about their company and products, Challengers approach customers with unique insights about how they can save or make money. They tailor their sales message to the customer's specific needs and objectives. Rather than acquiescing to the customer's every demand or objection, they are assertive, pushing back when necessary and taking control of the sale.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. The authors explain how almost any average-performing rep, once equipped with the right tools, can successfully reframe customers' expectations and deliver a distinctive purchase experience that drives higher levels of customer loyalty and, ultimately, greater growth.

The Psychology of Selling: Increase Your Sales Faster and Easier Than You Ever Thought Possible


Brian Tracy - 1988
    More sales people have become millionaires as a result of listening to and applying his ideas than from any other sales training process ever developed.

Integrity Selling for the 21st Century: How to Sell the Way People Want to Buy


Ron Willingham - 1987
    In the same industry, I have observed countless people who had been taught to sell with high integrity. Ironically, their customer satisfaction, profit margins, and salesperson retention were significantly higher." -- Ron Willingham If you've tried manipulative, self-focused selling techniques that demean you and your customer, if you've ever wondered if selling could be more than just talking people into buying, then Integrity Selling for the 21st Century is the book for you. Its concept is simple: Only by getting to know your customers and their needs -- and believing that you can meet those needs -- will you enjoy relationships with customers built on trust. And only then, when you bring more value to your customers than you receive in payment, will you begin to reap the rewards of high sales.Since the publication of Ron Willingham's enormously successful first book, Integrity Selling, his sales program has been adopted by dozens of Fortune 500 companies, such as Johnson & Johnson and IBM, as well as the American Red Cross and the New York Times. In his new book, Integrity Selling for the 21st Century, Willingham explains how his selling system relates to today's business climate -- when the need for integrity is greater than ever before.Integrity Selling for the 21st Century teaches a process of self-evaluation to help you become a stellar salesperson in any business climate. Once you've established your own goals and personality traits, you'll be able to evaluate them in your customers and adapt your styles to create a more trusting, productive relationship.Drawing upon Willingham's years of experience and success stories from sales forces of the more than 2,000 companies that have adopted the Integrity Selling system, Ron Willingham has created a blueprint for achieving success in sales while staying true to your values.

Conversations That Win the Complex Sale: Using Power Messaging to Create More Opportunities, Differentiate Your Solutions, and Close More Deals: Using Power Messaging to Create More Opportunities, Differentiate Your Solutions, and Close More Deals


Erik Peterson - 2011
    We believe the concepts are core to engaging in customer conversations that are focused on their outcomes and what they want to achieve."-Karen Quintos, CMO and SVP, Dell Inc."The concepts outlined in this book are critical skills to building a world-class presales organization."-Ken Hamel, Senior Vice President, Global Solutions and Presales, SAP"Our new messaging, using the approaches presented in this book, is great and is being widely used by our sales team. We've never had a year end sales meeting with content that was met with such widespread acceptance and enthusiasm."-Jerry D. Cline, Senior Vice President, Retail Sales and Marketing, AmerisourceBergen Drug Company"The best salespeople sit across the table and make change easy for their customer by creating a succinct story and vision for what to change, how to change it, and how it will impact customer results. An enterprise focus on sales messaging, using the concepts in this book, is the hidden secret to driving incremental sales productivity and overwhelming customer success!"-Ken Powell, Vice President, Worldwide Sales Enablement, ADP"The Power Messaging techniques in this book are the foundation of how our marketing team creates our sales messages, as well as the process our field sales teams use for delivering that message in a unique and compelling way. At Kronos our results are a reflection of the power of the tool."-Aron Ain, CEO, KronosAbout the Book: In today's highly competitive world of complex sales, commoditization of your brand is one of the greatest dangers. You must differentiate yourself from the competition-or you will lose out. And the way to do that is through customer engagement. Rather than sell your own corporate story and brand message, you need to tell customers their story-the one in which they are the heroes and they achieve success.Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer have been developing and honing their Power Messaging sales technique for more than 20 years, and now they reveal all their secrets in Conversations That Win the Complex Sale.Presenting a catalog of facts or playing 20 questions with prospective customers is the surest way to lose the sale. Peterson and Riesterer provide the tools you need to recraft your message into a compelling story that wins more deals.With Conversations That Win the Complex Sale, you'll learn how to:Differentiate yourself from the competition by finding your "Value Wedge" Avoid parity in your value propositions by creating "Power Positions" Create a message that can literally double the number of deals you close Spike customer attention and create "Wow" in your conversations Prove all your claims without resorting to lists of boring facts and statistics Your competitors are out there telling their own corporate story-a story customers don't want to hear. Now is the time to seize the moment. This book is the one and only source you need to reframe your sales story and turn the tables on the competition by fully engaging their would-be customers.Conversations That Win the Complex Sale helps you create and deliver messages that customers care about, giving your brand the clear edge in today's crowded markets.

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising


Ryan Holiday - 2013
    A new generation of multibillion dollar brands have been built without spending a dime on traditional marketing techniques. No press releases, no PR firm, and no billboards in Times Square.It wasn’t luck that took them from tiny start-ups to massive success. They have a new strategy, called Growth Hacking. And it works.In this e-special, bestselling author Ryan Holiday shows how the marketing game has changed forever. He explains the growth hacker mindset and provides a new set of rules—critical information whether you’re an aspiring marketer, an entrepreneur, or a Fortune 500 senior executive.

The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million


Mark Roberge - 2015
    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. As SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services for software company HubSpot, Mark led hundreds of his employees to the acquisition and retention of the company's first 10,000 customers across more than 60 countries. This book outlines his approach and provides an action plan for others to replicate his success, including the following key elements: Hire the same successful salesperson every time — The Sales Hiring Formula Train every salesperson in the same manner — The Sales Training Formula Hold salespeople accountable to the same sales process — The Sales Management Formula Provide salespeople with the same quality and quantity of leads every month — The Demand Generation Formula Leverage technology to enable better buying for customers and faster selling for salespeople Business owners, sales executives, and investors are all looking to turn their brilliant ideas into the next $100 million revenue business. Often, the biggest challenge they face is the task of scaling sales. They crave a blueprint for success, but fail to find it because sales has traditionally been referred to as an art form, rather than a science. You can't major in sales in college. Many people question whether sales can even be taught. Executives and entrepreneurs are often left feeling helpless and hopeless. The Sales Acceleration Formula completely alters this paradigm. In today's digital world, in which every action is logged and masses of data sit at our fingertips, building a sales team no longer needs to be an art form. There is a process. Sales can be predictable. A formula does exist.

Virtual Selling: A Quick-Start Guide to Leveraging Video, Technology, and Virtual Communication Channels to Engage Remote Buyers and Close Deals Fast (Jeb Blount)


Jeb Blount - 2020
    Panic. Social distancing. Working from home.Suddenly, virtual became king. Digital transformation rolled over us like a tidal wave.Virtual Selling is the new normal. To remain competitive, salespeople, account managers, entrepreneurs, and business professionals must shift the way they engage prospects and customers. There is no turning back.Virtual Selling can be challenging. Few of us haven't felt the wave of insecurity the instant a video camera is pointed in our direction. It's natural to feel intimidated by technology and digital tools. In the virtual world, everything moves fast.Virtual Selling is powerful. The good news is with a little training and a few easy-to-learn techniques, you can confidently master virtual sales calls, protect your income, and continue to serve and provide solutions to the customers who depend on you.Virtual Selling is the definitive resource and guide to leveraging video-based technology, digital tools, and virtual communication channels and techniques for human to human engagement and connection. You'll learn directly from Jeb Blount, one of the most sought-after and celebrated sales trainers of our generation.Jeb teaches you: How to choose the right technology stack for your unique situation The five elements of effective virtual sales calls The seven keys to making a lasting impression on video How to make the camera your best friend Why you must be video ready (BVR) all the time How to leverage virtual tools to get more done, in less time, with better outcomes Seven virtual communication strategies you must never forget How to conduct multi-stakeholder virtual sales calls The B.O.N.D. virtual engagement framework How to leverage digital tools to keep buyers engaged and deals advancing after the virtual call How to leverage the powerful M.L.P. strategy within the virtual sales process to bend win probability in your favor The five questions stakeholders are always asking on every virtual call The S.C.O.R.E. Discovery Method for virtual sales calls How to deliver effective virtual demos and presentations that grab attention and seal the deal Key strategies for leveraging Virtual Selling to reduce sales cycles and accelerate pipeline velocity How to ask for what you want, get past objections, and close the deal on virtual sales calls How to reduce costs and boost productivity with a blended virtual/physical sales approach that meets stakeholders where they are on the buying journey Mastering these techniques will instantly separate you from competitors and give you a distinct competitive edge.Virtual Selling is the most comprehensive resource on video-based and digital sales skills ever developed. As you dive into these powerful insights, and with each new chapter, you'll gain greater and greater confidence in your ability to conduct successful virtual sales calls. And, with this newfound confidence, your success and income will soar.Following in the footsteps of his blockbuster bestsellers People Buy You, Fanatical Prospecting, Sales EQ, Objections, and Inked, Jeb Blount's Virtual Selling puts the same strategies employed by his clients―a who's who of the world's most prestigious organizations―right into your hands.

The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results


Brent Adamson - 2015
    Now their latest research reveals something even more surprising: Being a Challenger seller isn’t enough. Your success or failure also depends on who you challenge.Picture your ideal customer: friendly, eager to meet, ready to coach you through the sale and champion your products and services across the organization. It turns out that’s the last person you need. Most marketing and sales teams go after low-hanging fruit: buyers who are eager and have clearly articulated needs. That’s simply human nature; it’s much easier to build a relationship with someone who always makes time for you, engages with your content, and listens attentively. But according to brand-new CEB research—based on data from thousands of B2B marketers, sellers, and buyers around the world—the highest-performing teams focus their time on potential customers who are far more skeptical, far less interested in meeting, and ultimately agnostic as to who wins the deal. How could this be?The authors of The Challenger Customer reveal that high-performing B2B teams grasp something that their average-performing peers don’t: Now that big, complex deals increasingly require consensus among a wide range of players across the organization, the limiting factor is rarely the salesperson’s inability to get an individual stakeholder to agree to a solution. More often it’s that the stakeholders inside the company can’t even agree with one another about what the problem is.It turns out only a very specific type of customer stakeholder has the credibility, persuasive skill, and will to effectively challenge his or her colleagues to pursue anything more ambitious than the status quo. These customers get deals to the finish line far more often than friendlier stakeholders who seem so receptive at first. In other words, Challenger sellers do best when they target Challenger customers. The Challenger Customer unveils research-based tools that will help you distinguish the "Talkers" from the "Mobilizers" in any organization. It also provides a blueprint for finding them, engaging them with disruptive insight, and equipping them to effectively challenge their own organization.

Insight Selling: Surprising Research on What Sales Winners Do Differently


Mike Schultz - 2014
    They studied more than 700 business-to-business purchases made by buyers who represented a total of $3.1 billion in annual purchasing power. When they compared the winners to the second-place finishers, they found surprising results.Not only do sales winners sell differently, they sell radically differently, than the second-place finishers. In recent years, buyers have increasingly seen products and services as replaceable. You might think this would mean that the sale goes to the lowest bidder. Not true! A new breed of seller—the insight seller—is winning the sale with strong prices and margins even in the face of increasing competition and commoditization.In Insight Selling, Schultz and Doerr share the surprising results of their research on what sales winners do differently, and outline exactly what you need to do to transform yourself and your team into insight sellers. They introduce a simple three-level model based on what buyers say tip the scales in favor of the winners:Level 1 “Connect.” Winners connect the dots between customer needs and company solutions, while also connecting with buyers as people.Level 2 “Convince.” Winners convince buyers that they can achieve maximum return, that the risks are acceptable, and that the seller is the best choice among all options.Level 3 “Collaborate.” Winners collaborate with buyers by bringing new ideas to the table, delivering new ideas and insights, and working with buyers as a team.They also found that much of the popular and current advice given to sellers can damage sales results. Insight Selling is both a strategic and tactical guide that will separate the good advice from the bad, and teach you how to put the three levels of selling to work to inspire buyers, influence their agendas, and maximize value. If you want to find yourself and your team in the winner’s circle more often, this book is a must-read.

The One-Page Proposal: How to Get Your Business Pitch onto One Persuasive Page


Patrick G. Riley - 2002
    Now, in the first book of its kind, successful entrepreneur Patrick Riley shows you how to boil all the elements of your business proposal into one persuasive page magnify your business potential in the process.