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.     Read More »

Shopping for a new camera might seem exciting at first, but is never an easy task.  Especially if, like me, you’ve decided to get serious with your photography and buy a semi-professional camera.  What should the pixel count be?  What is a good format size?  How well does the camera handle noise?

The list of considerations is endless …

And it’s a big decision.  Once you commit to a brand, you tend to stick with it for future cameras, so you can take advantage of the investments you make in the camera, such as lenses, which are rarely compatible across brands.

Recently, my search for a camera led me to the nearest Canon store.  To my surprise, it wasn’t really a store in the traditional sense, but rather, what Canon calls, an Experience Center. 

What distinguished it from a traditional store was that you couldn’t really purchase anything.  It was meant instead for you to experience the brand.  The staff was extremely knowledgeable, spending a generous amount of time with each visitor.  You could try your hand at all the Canon products, even the ones that you knew you couldn’t afford.

By the time I was done, I was convinced that Canon was the brand for me.  I realized just how successfully they had sold me the experience (and not just a product) and possibly made a customer for life. 

Though this was a B2C retail experience, there are a couple things we can learn here that apply to B2B sales:  Read More »

You count on your star salespeople. They’ve delivered the number time and time again, so you know you can lean on them in a pinch. But how do you know when you’re leaning on a star too much?

In a prolonged pinch like the recent global recession, we ask more from our salespeople than ever. It is perhaps unsurprising then that 73% of reps believe that their sales goals are unachievable. This is a cause for concern; we all know that nothing deflates sales rep morale like an unreachable goal.

To combat this risk, conventional wisdom teaches us to watch for the tell-tale signs of employee burnout – particularly with star performers who are  exceptionally prone to overextension. 

But according to Duke University (and U.S. Olympic) Men’s Basketball coach Mike Kryryzewski, all of this pooh-poohing of star performers is nonsense. Kyryzewski (a.k.a. Coach K) has faced a media onslaught in recent months for the unusually high minutes-per-game his stars log.

The questions are not unfounded: of the Atlantic Coast Conference’s four “most-played” basketball players this year, three are at Duke. In fact, all five of the most-played athletes in ACC history have played under Coach K, leading some analysts to attribute Duke’s chronic NCAA tournament underperformance in recent years to late season fatigue.

Contrarian though it may be, Kryryzewski’s take on the issue – which he says he’s learned from years of experience – is simple:  When the going gets tough, your stars want to play. That’s a big part of why they’re stars. The best thing you can do as a leader is let them play. Read More »

As we dip our toe into the waters of the blogosphere, one of the biggest questions we faced for the blog itself was:  what to call it?  Those of you who’ve spent some time with our materials know that we spend an inordinate amount of time on page titles alone so it was a spirited discussion here in the researcher dungeon. 

(Side note: if you look at our study Deepening Customer Relationships, the titles of the first five pages are: “The train has left the station,” “I thought I meant more to you,” “Through bad times and good,” “Two sides of the same coin,” and “Taking the next step.”  Intriguing enough for a closer look??)

But once we came up with Sales Challenger, the discussion was over.  Why?  Well, the Sales Challenger really encapsulates the two major goals we are trying to achieve with this blog: Read More »

Welcome to The Sales Challenger, a new blog brought to you by the Sales Executive Council (SEC). For those of you who don’t know SEC, we are a membership-based organization for senior sales leaders and their teams from the world’s largest B2B companies.  Our value proposition to members, in short, is to provide leading-edge insight on what the most progressive sales organizations are doing to tackle today’s most vexing sales challenges.

While longtime members will fondly recall the days when they received their SEC studies in the mail (you will still find many of those shiny green tomes on sales executives’ bookshelves around the globe), we’ve found over the years that the sales world moves a little too quickly for executives’ needs to be addressed simply through 6-month-long research projects.  While these big studies will always be a core part of what we do, we’ve begun to invest in a number of capabilities to speed up our ability to share insight with members.

We’ve created platforms to put members in touch with one another quickly and efficiently (check out the Sales Ops Forum, our moderated community of more than 3000 sales operations professionals exchanging views and peer-to-peer advice on a wide range of issues) and have now launched The Sales Challenger to allow us to quickly and informally disseminate what we’re learning to sales leaders.  

We will refresh this blog several times per week, so come back often and, by all means, share your comments—positive, negative or otherwise.  In terms of content sections, look for the following:

• The Buzz –our point of view on emerging and newsworthy issues and trends
• From The Road – anecdotes from our recent meetings and calls with members
• Sales Insights – breakdown of our ongoing and existing research
• Practical Advice – tips and tricks to make you more effective in your day-to-day job
• Diversions – light, fun (more random) topics

Until next time, happy selling!