10 Must-Read Books for Sales and Marketing

Professionals who work with clients or large accounts can create lifetime relationships based on these well-researched secrets. Based drawing from extensive interviews with client executives, Making Rain offers a series of provocative insights on how to shed the expert-for-hire label and develop long-term advisory relationships. Exploding the popular myth of the "Rainmaker," a dated and dysfunctional figure that clients no longer welcome, Andrew Sobel argues that any professional can learn to "make rain" on an ongoing basis with existing clients by developing a special set of skills, attitudes, and strategies. These innovative tips and techniques from a recognized leader in the field of professional services will enable any consultant, salesperson, or service professional to create enduring client loyalty.

What's the secret to sales success? If you're like most business leaders, you'd say it's fundamentally about relationships and you'd be wrong. The best salespeople don't just build relationships with customers. They challenge them.

From the world's leading high-tech strategist comes the definitive road map to help established companies create next-generation growth. Geoffrey Moore's now classic Crossing the Chasm became a must-read book by presenting an innovative frame work to address the make or break obstacle facing all high tech companies: how to gain market share from early adopters and from mainstream consumers. Based on twenty years' experience advising the top leaders of many of the world's most successful entereprises. Moore's Escape Velocity offers a pragmatic plan to engage the most critical challenge that established enterprises face in the twenty-first-century economy: how to move beyond past success and drive next-generation growth from new lines of business. As he worked with senior management teams, Moore repeatedly found that executives were trapped by short-term performance-based compensation schemes. The result was critical decision-makers overweighting their legacy commitments, an embarassingly low success rate in new-product launches, and widespread failure to sustain any kind of next-generation business at scale. In Escape Velocity, Moore presents a cogent strategy for generating future growth within an established enterprise. Organized a hierarchy of powers--category power, company power, market power, offer power and execution power--this insightful work shows how each level of power can be orchestrated to achieve overall success. Moore explains - how to use mergers and acquisitions as well as organic innovation to systematically migrate an enterprise's portfolio out of lower-growth and into higher-growth categories; - how to reallocate resources across an enterprise in deliberately asymmetrical ways to create a powerful and sustainable foundation for long-term competitive advantage; - how to leverage target-market initiatives as accelerants to growth and as stepping-stones to broad overall category success; - how to create unmatchable offerings by being swift to neutralize competitors' innovations and laser-focused on driving in-house innovations to make a business imperious to competitors; - how to fundamentally change the execution cadence of an organizations, pushing change from innovation to broad deployment, creating an irreversible tipping point along the way.

Win more deals with the perfect sales story!

“Power Messaging is a foundational element in our global marketing campaigns and sales training programs. 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, Kronos

About 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.

The new way to transform a sales culture with clarity, authenticity, and emotional intelligence.Too often, the sales process is all about fear.Customers are afraid that they will be talked into making a mistake; salespeople dread being unable to close the deal and make their quotas. No one is happy.Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig offer a better way. Salespeople, they argue, do best when they focus 100 percent on helping clients succeed. When customers are successful, both buyer and seller win. When they aren't, both lose. It's no longer sufficient to get clients to buy—a salesperson must also help the client reduce costs, increase revenues, and improve productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction.This book shares the unique FranklinCovey Sales Performance Group methodology that will help readers:• Start new business from scratch in a way both salespeople and clients can feel good about • Ask hard questions in a soft way • Close the deal by opening minds

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation.

Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.

Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to "the business model generation!"

The Leaky Funnel is the marketing strategy book authored by Hugh Macfarlane. This business novel is packed with fresh, key arguments for a major change in the way businesses organise and manage their combined Sales and Marketing resources. The central argument, that a new framework is needed for the aggregate Sales and Marketing force, is based on Hugh's 20 years-plus experience, and has now been well proven in many leading businesses as a means of accelerating the effectiveness of their endeavours to earn more customers. "At last something different. This is a realistic picture of how sales and marketing get negotiated inside an organisation." -- Grahame Dowling. Professor of Marketing, Australian Graduate School of Management "highly relevant look at one of today's most critical topics, how to bring sales and marketing together." -- Don Schultz. Professor Emeritus-in-Service, Northwestern University, USA

Crossing the Chasm (1991; rev. 1999) demonstrates the existence of distinct marketing challenges for each market segment in the life cycle of new technology-based products. A significant gulf -- the "chasm" -- exists between the market made up of early adopters and the markets of more pragmatic buyers. To cross the chasm, a product team must identify the needs of pragmatic buyers and deliver a "whole product" that more than meets those needs. This landmark book, part of the HarperBusiness Essentials series, shows just how to do that.

The indispensable classic on marketing by the bestselling author of Tribes and Purple Cow. Legendary business writer Seth Godin has three essential questions for every marketer: “What’s your story?” “Will the people who need to hear this story believe it?” “Is it true?” All marketers tell stories. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche is vastly superior to a $36,000 Volkswagen that’s virtually the same car. We believe that $225 sneakers make our feet feel better—and look cooler—than a $25 brand. And believing it makes it true. As Seth Godin has taught hundreds of thousands of marketers and students around the world, great marketers don’t talk about features or even benefits. Instead, they tell a story—a story we want to believe, whether it’s factual or not. In a world where most people have an infinite number of choices and no time to make them, every organization is a marketer, and all marketing is about telling stories. Marketers succeed when they tell us a story that fits our worldview, a story that we intuitively embrace and then share with our friends. Think of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, or Fiji water, or the iPod. But beware: If your stories are inauthentic, you cross the line from fib to fraud. Marketers fail when they are selfish and scurrilous, when they abuse the tools of their trade and make the world worse. That’s a lesson learned the hard way by telemarketers, cigarette companies, and sleazy politicians. But for the rest of us, it’s time to embrace the power of the story. As Godin writes, “Stories make it easier to understand the world. Stories are the only way we know to spread an idea. Marketers didn’t invent storytelling. They just perfected it.”

The most important question for any organization There's a naturally occurring pattern shared by the people and organizations that achieve the greatest long-term success. From Martin Luther King Jr. to Steve Jobs, from the pioneers of aviation to the founders of Southwest Airlines, the most inspiring leaders think, act, and communicate the exact same way—and it's the complete opposite of everyone else.The common thread, according to Simon Sinek, is that they all start with why. This simple question has the power to inspire others to achieve extraordinary things.Any organization can explain what it does; some can explain how; but very few can clearly articulate why. Why do we offer these particular products or services? Why do our customers choose us? Why do our employees stay (or leave)? Once you have those answers, teams get stronger, the mission clicks into place, and the path ahead becomes much clearer.Starting with why is the key to everything from putting a man on the moon to launching the iPod. Drawing on a wide range of fascinating examples, Sinek shows readers how to apply why to their culture, hiring decisions, product development, sales, marketing, and many other challenges. Some naturally think this way, but Sinek proves that anyone can learn how.