I love summer reading lists – they give me ideas and it’s fun to see what other people want to learn more about. With that said, below is a reading list of books somewhat related to Sales. This is a personal selection and I’m hoping that everybody will chime in with their own ideas below.

Though it’s nice if the book has some relevance to business, that isn’t necessarily the most important thing. In fact, I find it’s often things that are only tangentially related to Sales that provide the most stimulus for me.

First, I’m going to recommend some older books. These seem especially relevant because of the current economic environment in which we cannot rely on continued private sector growth and where sales organizations have to work hard to get customers over their fears.

1)      Everybody in Sales and Marketing needs to have read “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert B. Cialdini. This is one of the best-known books examining how we make decisions and how we prioritize different kinds of information. It has some obvious implications for how to position and leverage the sales process, but it’s also a great read. And once you’ve read Influence, you can skip the mountain of related books such as Nudge or Predictably Irrational, all of which, to greater or lesser degrees, are based on the idea that we are all systematically prone to making the same mistakes over and over when it comes to making decisions.

2)      Similarly important is “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” by Al Ries and Jack Trout. While the stories and anecdotes are beginning to show their age, this is probably the single best book on Marketing that I have ever read. It ties in nicely with the Cialdini book because the authors leverage many of the same behavioral insights, though theirs were substantially derived through practice rather than formal analysis; and the book is none the worse for it.

Moving on to some newer books, here are a couple that recently stood out for me – and please use the comments section to add yours below.    

3)      There are lots of books on negotiation (I’m a particular fan of “Negotiation Genius” by Deepak Malhotra and Max H. Bazerman) but the most interesting book I’ve recently read on the subject is “The Gridlock Economy” by Michael Heller. This is a hard read all about “how ownership rights wreck markets and stop innovation” by fragmenting ownership and making it impossible for any one actor to profitably assemble all the pieces required to put together a solution. What makes the book hard is that most of us will want to read the book with the reverse intent; so not just want to explore a legal problem as Heller does, but also look at how to profitably benefit from some of the dynamics explored.

4)      Coming off a year of writing about the demands placed on sales managers, I sometimes wonder if there’s anything that I haven’t read on the subject. Frankly, a lot of the advice starts blurring together but one really stands out: Henry Mintzberg and his latest piece Managing. Mintzberg is firmly of the opinion that management is not a profession with defined rules and is certainly not a science in which outcomes can be roughly predicted depending on the inputs. And if you’ve wondered what it means to actually do leadership, then I’d like to think that Mintzberg provides an answer.

5)      And for anyone, like me, who regularly comes out of meetings wondering why they said what they said, then Marshall Goldsmith’s “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” is indispensable. Part of me thinks that Goldsmith should have written novels—his prose is that good—but literature’s loss is management’s gain. He lists a series of mistakes we all might make in interpersonal communications and solves half the problem by providing “the 20 workplace habits you need to break”. My favorite bad habit is # 8: Negativity or “Let me explain why that won’t work”…

Anyway, 5 recommendations seems like enough from me – what reading would you recommend for the summer?

No related posts.