Because who can read more than one sales book per month these days?
Whether you’re a seasoned sales veteran trying to stay tuned to the industry’s trajectory, or just getting into sales, these are the best books on sales for you to read. We wanted to deviate from the standard lists of sales books that feature only the classics, despite many of them being outdated and irrelevant. Our list only contains books written in the last decade.
We also organized the reading list by quarter, focusing more on planning and execution in the early quarters, and closing deals and Revenue Operations & Intelligence (RO&I) in the second half of the year.
Understanding the importance of time management and sales productivity, we also took the liberty of calculating the time it would take to read each book. Our methodology is based on the number of pages (assuming 300 words per page on average) and a reading speed of 200 words per minute.
Kicking off Q1 with a sales plan and sales playbook is essential to meeting goals throughout the rest of the year and effectively achieving those goals.
Carlos Horner has decades of experience in business development, growth, and sales training. In his book, The Sales Plan, Carlos distills success in sales down to five key areas:
Laura Posey is a widely acclaimed author, speaker, and consultant who has asserted her influence in the planning processes at thousands of companies. In this book, Laura brings the latest in neuroscience research applied to the art of making a plan and sticking to it.
In this book, you’ll learn:
The subtitle to this book is almost as comprehensive as the book itself: How Next Gen B2B Sales Organizations Accelerate Sales Productivity, Operationalize Hyper-Growth Strategies, Lock Out Competitors, and Expand Customer Relationships.
Jeb Blount self-identifies as a sales acceleration specialist and co-wrote this book with Jason Eatmon, a former master sales trainer, and current chief experience officer.
As technology continues to remove barriers to entry and margins are squeezed in a race for the bottom, there’s a growing need to differentiate your business and deliver more valuable outcomes for customers.
Blount and Eatmon advocate you dig a moat around your sales strategy through accelerating sales productivity and operationalizing hyper growth strategies. Some of the areas covered in the book include:
In our hypothetical year of sales books, Q2 is reserved for books on “how to sell.” From inside and outside sales to a streamlined methodology, these books can help encompass your team’s strategy and selling style.
Trish Bertuzzi has spent the greater part of three decades building, scaling, and optimizing inside sales teams, which is the subject of her cookbook for inside sales recipes.
The subtitle suggests you’ll learn to “build repeatable pipeline and accelerate growth with inside sales.” To meet this lofty goal, Trish breaks down her playbook into six distinct areas:
Ryan Reisert and Rex Biberston set out to write a book that has relevance in today’s environment and doesn’t require much time to read—if that wasn’t made clear by the title.
The shortest read on our list, clocking in at just under two hours, Outbound Sales, No Fluff, is a great introduction to modern outbound selling. It covers a few key topics:
Since Ryan has a degree in mathematics, you can bet this last bullet is a well-thought-out and trustworthy source for learning how to think about your funnel.
Yes, another book by these prolific authors and influential sales leaders. Triangle Selling is a modern take on the fundamentals of selling today wrapped up into a “five-minute framework.”
Their book and framework will help you:
Although Revenue Operations & Intelligence (RO&I) should be an area of focus at all times, in the context of our book curriculum, we placed it in Q3.
John McMahon has the unique distinction of being the only Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) for five publicly traded companies. In his widely acclaimed book, The Qualified Sales Leader, John covers a few key domains of a successful sales leader:
Aaron Ross gained his early experience in generating predictable revenue when he helped add $100 million in annual recurring revenue to Salesforce. Marylou Tyler has a 34-year track record of sales process systemization and making everything from revenue to prospecting more predictable.
In their book, Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com, Ross and Tyler provide insight into the outbound strategy that they coin “cold calling 2.0” which increases response rates by 9% and boosts revenue from cold prospects. They also cover how to turn sales teams into autonomous vehicles and employees into mini-CEOs.
Mark Roberge, an engineer by training and an early employee at HubSpot helped grow annual revenue from $0 to $100 million. Roberge then went on to be HubSpot’s Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) for their sales division.
The Sales Acceleration Formula provides an engineering-driven roadmap for building and scaling a sales engine for predictable results. Revenue isn’t the only thing Roberge advocates for predictability, but also:
All of these variables comprise the Sales Acceleration Formula, which leverages technology and data to increase success with inbound sales.
Hopefully by now you’ve learned enough to close on predictable revenue, but in our Q4 reading curriculum, we cover how to do just that: close more deals.
Chris Voss is a former expert hostage negotiator for the FBI and has accumulated a wealth of knowledge and experience at the negotiating table. Some of the strategies Voss suggests run counter to most previously established beliefs about the psychology of sales and negotiation.
In his bestselling book, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, Voss covers nine principles, many of which are counterintuitive, about getting the best result for everyone involved in a negotiation.
We introduced Jeb Blount earlier in the context of planning and processes for driving B2B growth. In his book, Objections: The Ultimate Guide for Mastering The Art and Science of Getting Past No, Jeb discusses the science of resistance and why customers have objections.
With that foundation, this book helps:
Shelle Rose Charvet is an expert on language and the founder of the Institute for Influence, a leadership training program for women. In this book, Shelle helps you decode the buyer’s language to influence their decisions without being manipulative.
This book will help you close more deals by:
As an extension of our Q4 curriculum, this eBook provides a step-by-step guide to the annual planning process for your GTM initiatives in 2022 and beyond. You’ll also learn how to:
The modern sales manager is so busy playing and coaching the game that there’s little time left for performance evaluation or the post-game analysis. Ultimately, however, this latter process is what helps iterate your sales process toward its full potential.
In this eBook, you’ll learn a data-driven approach to account-based everything (ABX), especially account planning and opportunity management.
Many sales teams make the mistake of analyzing past performance to gauge future results. This is akin to using the rearview mirror to drive to your destination.
That’s not to say that you only need to look out the windshield and aimlessly drive until you someday reach your goal destination—you need to use the sales equivalent of GPS navigation. A BI dashboard built on leading indicators is the GPS of sales.
In this eBook, you’ll learn how leading indicators enable more predictable revenue growth and help organizations anticipate risks, take action, and proactively drive results.
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