Salespeople are always evolving and trying to improve selling skills and closing techniques. One of the best ways to keep up on the latest sales techniques is read and study the best sales books.
These recommended books will help to expand your sales knowledge, and improve your sales performance.
I pulled together the top sales books from a range of disciplines to give you the information you need to stay relevant, lead conversations, understand the trends — and of course, improve your sales game.
This list is not endorsed or sponsored in any way. It’s simply my opinion of the best sales books to read.
Sales books that made the cut:
- Have been recommended by sales professionals
- Are being talked about within the community and mentioned by experts
- Are recently published books that will be valuable for decades to come
15 Best Sales Books
- Seven Figure Social Selling
- The Sales Development Playbook
- More Sales, Less Time
- Sales EQ: How Ultra High Performers Leverage Sales-Specific Emotional Intelligence to Close the Complex Deal
- Sales Secrets: The World's Top Salespeople Share Their Secrets to Success
- Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com
- A Mind for Sales: Daily Habits and Practical Strategies for Sales Success
- The Psychology of Selling: Increase Your Sales Faster and Easier Than You Ever Thought Possible
- Selling with EASE
- Whatever It Takes: Master the Habits to Transform Your Business, Relationships, and Life
- From Impossible To Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue
- High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results
- B2B Is Really P2P: How to Win With High Touch in a High Tech World
- Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
- The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure
Top Sales Performers Are Students of the Game
No one rises to the top of their company without intentional growth and learning. If you truly want to be a better leader, better salesperson, better speaker, better writer, or just a better person, you need to study the craft.
All the knowledge you need to improve your sales game is out there. Some of the sales books in this list are classics, but they still get read because they’re still relevant in today’s world.
Brandon Bornancin- Seven Figure Social Selling
If you’ve ever been frustrated by the lack of appointments, lack of sales, or lack of income to provide for your family or build the life you want and always dreamed of...then this is the book you need!
One of the 15 books inside the Seven Figure Sales System, Seven Figure Social Selling contains easy-to-implement social selling scripts, strategies, systems, and secrets to winning your dream customers on LinkedIn.
This step-by-step guide will help anyone get more leads, appointments, and sales...no matter what you sell or who you sell to (even if you don’t have a big social network and zero social selling experience).
In fact, Seven Figure Social Selling is the exact playbook Brandon Bornancin and his team at Seamless.AI use to flood their calendars with 75 to 100 appointments every single day! They generate millions in sales and consistently receive more than one million views a month on LinkedIn.
Trish Bertuzzi
Raise your hand if your company needs more new customers.
I suspect your hand is (figuratively) up. This book is about not just growth, but high-growth, explosive-growth, the kind of growth that weather satellites can see from space. The success of any business-to-business company is directly linked to how effectively they acquire new pipeline. To skyrocket growth, sales development is the answer.
The Sales Development Playbook encapsulates author Trish Bertuzzi's three decades of practical, hands-on experience. It presents six elements for building new pipeline and accelerating revenue growth with inside sales.
Jill Konrath
Jill Konrath, a globally recognized sales consultant and speaker, knew she needed help but found that advice aimed at typical workers didn't work for her - or for others who needed to sell for a living. Salespeople need their own productivity guidelines adapted to the fast-paced, always-on sales world. So Konrath experimented relentlessly to discover the best time savers and sales hacks in order to deliver the first productivity guide specifically for sales success.
In More Sales, Less Time, Konrath blends cutting-edge behavioral research with her own deep knowledge of sales to teach you how to succeed in this age of distraction.
You'll discover how to:
- Reclaim a minimum of one hour per day by eliminating major time sucks and changing the way you tackle email and social media
- Free up time to focus on activities that have the highest impact on your sales results, such as preparing, researching, strategizing, and connecting with customers
- Optimize your sales processes to eliminate redundancies and wasted time
- Transform your mind-set to effortlessly incorporate new, more productive habits; leverage your best brain power; and stay at the top of your sales game
Konrath helps you develop strategies specifically tailored to your life in sales, using your strengths to cut through the feeling of being overwhelmed. All salespeople have the same number of hours in a day; it's up to you to rescue your time to sell smarter.
Jeb Blount
Sales EQ begins where The Challenger Sale, Strategic Selling, and Spin Selling leave off. It addresses the human relationship gap in the modern sales process at a time when sales organizations are failing because many salespeople have never been taught the human skills required to effectively engage buyers at the emotional level.
Jeb Blount makes a compelling case that sales specific emotional intelligence (Sales EQ) is more essential to success than education, experience, industry awareness, product knowledge, skills, or raw IQ; and, sales professionals who invest in developing and improving Sales EQ gain a decisive competitive advantage in the hyper-competitive global marketplace.
Brandon Bornancin- Sales Secrets
Sales Secrets unlocks all the secrets to sell anything to anyone from interviews with the world’s top sales experts. This book is the ultimate playbook from hundreds of sales experts on their top secrets to increasing your sales no matter what you sell or who you sell to.
For the last two years, Brandon Bornancin has interviewed hundreds of world-class sales performers for his number-one podcast Sales Secrets. The guests range from infamous celebrities like Gary Vaynerchuk, Jordan Belfort, and Ryan Serhant to legendary sales performers like Heather Monahan, Trish Bertuzzi, Anthony Iannarino, Jeffrey Gitomer, Jarrod Glandt, and others.
In Sales Secrets, you will get:
- Secret strategies. Get access to the most exclusive collection of sales secrets used by the top one percent to maximize sales and achieve success in business and life.
- Actionable advice. Get real advice on how to execute the best sales strategies from the world’s top sales experts. It’s like having 100+ sales mentors in your pocket 24/7, all in just one book.
- Examples of use. Get a backstage pass to study how the best salespeople and entrepreneurs are using these sales secrets to acquire new customers, outsell the competition, and win big in their industry.
Aaron Ross
Discover the outbound sales process that, in just a few years, helped add $100 million in recurring revenue to Salesforce.com, almost doubling their enterprise growth... with zero cold calls. Get Predictable Revenue here.
Learn:
- How an outbound sales process ("Cold Calling 2.0"), that without cold calls or a marketing budget, can generate a 9% response rate and millions of dollars from cold prospects.
- The Seven Fatal Sales Mistakes CEOs and Sales VPs (even experienced ones) make time and time again.
- How outbound sales and selling can be friendly, helpful and enjoyable.
- How to develop self-managing sales teams, turning your employees into mini-CEOs
Mark Hunter
For salespeople tired of feeling stressed out, burned out, and bummed out that their customers don’t want to hear from them, A Mind for Sales is the guide they need to develop a success mindset and the habits required to breakthrough to a whole new level of sales performance.
Let A Mind for Sales inspire and prepare you to form the new thoughts and habits you need to succeed and to realize the incredible rewards that a successful life in sales makes possible.
- Feel re-energized by renewed purpose and success in your sales role by following the success cycle approach outlined in the book.
- Receive practical strategies on how to change your mindset and succeed in sales.
- Learn the daily habits needed to maximize productivity and make hitting the ground running strategy number one.
- Gain real-world insights from Hunter’s vast experience as a highly successful sales professional and sales coach.
Brian Tracy
Double and triple your sales—in any market.
The purpose of this book is to give you a series of ideas, methods, strategies, and techniques that you can use immediately to make more sales, faster and easier than ever before.
It’s a promise of prosperity that sales guru Brian Tracy has seen fulfilled again and again. 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. Get Psychology of Selling here.
Chris Murray
There are 4 distinct steps to every business transaction employed by all successful salespeople – and it’s the understanding and execution of those 4 steps that separates the elite from the rest of the pack.
Why do we all find it so difficult to recall more than one or two occasions when we felt that we were treated exceptionally by the salesperson who dealt with us? Is it that the majority of those sales people knew the four steps but chose not to make use of them? Or maybe common (sales) sense isn’t quite as common as many people like to pretend it is. If that’s the case, then it’s probably time for this information to be broken down, simplified and re-explained – so that it can be implemented effectively by all those who find themselves at the frontline.
If you want genuine sales and business success that (as an added bonus) leads to satisfied customers who would happily recommend you and then come back for more – then you really need to read Selling With EASE.
Brandon Bornancin- Whatever it Takes
From a serial entrepreneur who has closed over $100M in sales and founded two eight-figure companies, including one of LinkedIn’s top 50 startups, comes a no-BS guide to getting everything you want out of your business, relationships, and life.
No matter who you are or where you come from, your education, or your network, you can defy the odds to create the life you want and build the business you’ve only dreamed about. His journey is all the proof you need.
Brandon Bornancin graduated college flat broke. He started a business that was an epic failure. Then, he turned it all around - before he was 30 - closing over $100 million in sales for Google and IBM and founding two multimillion-dollar companies, the second named “LinkedIn’s top 50 startups.
”How did he do it? By doing Whatever it Takes. In this no-nonsense guide to success, you’ll learn the empowering beliefs and transformative habits needed to achieve all that you want in business and in life. You’ll discover the secrets of wildly successful people - how they think, what they say, and what they do to make their dreams come true so that you can, too!
Aaron Ross & Jason Lemkin
From Impossible to Inevitable details the hypergrowth playbook of companies like Hubspot, Salesforce.com (the fastest growing multibillion dollar software company), and EchoSign—aka Adobe Document Services (which catapulted from $0 to $144 million in seven years). Whether you have a $1 billion or a $100,000 business, you can use the same insights as these notable companies to learn what it really takes to break your own revenue records.
- Pinpoint why you aren’t growing faster
- Understand what it takes to get to hypergrowth
- Nail a niche (the #1 missing growth ingredient)
- What every revenue leader needs to know about building a scalable sales team
Mark Hunter
Search engines and social media have certainly changed how prospecting pipelines for salespeople are built today, but the vitality of the pipeline itself has not. Even today, the key to success for every salesperson is his pipeline of prospects.
Top producers are still prospecting. All. The. Time. However, buyers have evolved, therefore your prospecting needs to as well. In High-Profit Prospecting, sales expert Mark Hunter shatters costly prospecting myths and eliminates confusion about what works today.
Merging new strategies with proven practices that unfortunately many have given up this must-have resource for salespeople in every industry will help you:
- Find better leads and qualify them quickly
- Trade cold calling for informed calling
- Tailor your timing and message
- Leave a great voicemail and craft a compelling email
- Use social media effectively
- Leverage referrals
- Get past gatekeepers and open new doors•
- For the salesperson, prospecting is still king. Take back control of your pipeline for success!
Frank Somma
Selling is an art and a science and this book brings you both!
Frank Somma has written a virtual step by step manual for sales managers, sales teams, business owners, and solopreneurs who want to create instant rapport, spike sales and cement long-term customer loyalty. In B2B Is Really P2P, you’ll read many more of Frank’s real-life stories, embedded with immediately actionable tools for creating rapport and understanding with virtually anyone.
A graduate of the Neuro-linguistic Programming Institute, Frank breaks down the components of the sales gene and teaches you the nuances of body language, vocal intonations, word choice and microexpressions that lead to rapport, trust, likeability, and long-term relationships.
Whether you’re a seasoned sales veteran, sales leader or a Gen-Next college grad just starting out, you will find tools, techniques and best practices utilizing the varied communication skills Frank describes.
Also included are interviews with some of the most successful sales professionals and entrepreneurs in the country and share with you their points of view on high achieving sales today. Selling is no longer the art of the deal. It’s the art of the relationship.
Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan
The title mentions “the discipline of getting things done.” That alone should inspire you to read this book.
Ram Charan is a business legend, and has advised some of the greatest CEOs of all time, while Larry Bossidy has led incredibly successful companies like Honeywell and GE.
Execution is a Discipline that must be a core component of organizations, but should also be at your core. What people say they’ll do and what they actually do are often two different things. Just get ‘er done!
Grant Cardone
Extreme success, by definition, lies beyond the realm of normal action. If you want to achieve extreme success, you can’t operate like everybody else and settle for mediocrity. You need to remove luck and chance from your business equation, and lock in massive success. The 10X Rule shows you how! Success is your duty, obligation and responsibility, and this audio book gives you step-by-step guidance on how to achieve phenomenal success for yourself!
With The 10X Rule, you’ll learn to establish the amount of effort needed to guarantee success and ensure that you can continue operating at this level throughout your life.
The 10X Rule guides you toward the frame of mind that all successful people share. Aim ten times higher than you are right now—and if you come up short, you’ll still find yourself further along than if you had maintained your life’s current status quo. The 10X Rule teaches you how to:
- Reach goals that you previously thought were impossible
- Correctly set goals and guarantee their achievement
- Create unprecedented levels of happiness and satisfaction in every area of your life
- Use fear as fuel to move you into action
- Get everything you want and never have to settle
- Dominate your competition and become a role model for success
Which Book Wins Your Vote for Best Sales Book?
These books will without a doubt enhance your sales skills and knowledge, and help you to advance your career. Each book has unique interests and goals, so which book would you consider to be the most valuable? Let us know below
6 Bonus Sales Books to Read
As a sales development representative (SDR), your primary goal is to maximize appointments, sales, and success for your company. To achieve this, it's important to continuously educate yourself and improve your skills. Here are ten books that can help you do just that:
1. "The Sales Acceleration Formula" by Mark Roberge
In this book, the author shares the secrets to growing a successful sales team. He discusses how to set goals, measure progress, and create a high-performing sales culture.
2. "Fanatical Prospecting" by Jeb Blount
If you struggle with generating leads and making connections, this book is for you. It teaches you how to effectively prospect and build a pipeline of potential customers.
3. "Gap Selling" by Keagan
In this book, the author teaches you how to identify and overcome objections during the sales process. He also provides strategies for building trust and closing deals.
4. "Never Split The Difference" by Chris Voss
This book is all about negotiation and how to get what you want in any situation. It's a must-read for any SDR looking to improve their persuasion skills.
5. "The Challenger Sale" by Matt Dixon
In this book, the authors share their research on the most effective sales techniques and how to apply them in the modern world.
6. "Sell or Be Sold" by Grant Cardone
In this book, the author teaches you how to take control of your sales career and achieve the success you deserve. He provides practical strategies and tactics for increasing your appointments and closing more deals.
Bonus Leadership Book
The Power of Going All-In Review by Brandon Bornancin
While Brandon Bornancin is synonymous with sales advice and strategy, his latest book with Wiley, The Power of Going All-In, ventures off into the world of business leadership and management.
This book shares 365 secrets to help you troubleshoot common management challenges like dealing with underperformers, bouncing back from poor revenue performance, and cutting down employee churn. Whether you’re a newbie and just starting out in your first management role with no clue where to begin with team building. Or you’re a seasoned vet, and you’ve lost that fire in your belly for leadership. The Power of Going All-In does a great job of providing solid advice for everybody and, more importantly, reminding you of why you took on a leadership position in the first place: To connect with people and help your employees unlock their greatest talents.
Staff Recommended Sales Books
Way of the Wolf Straight Line Selling: Master the Art of Persuasion, Influence, and Success by Jordan Belfort
If you like The Wolf of Wall Street, you’ll love Way of the Wolf because it’s written by Jordan Belfort, the real-life sales genius that Leonard DiCaprio's character portrays in the movie. In this book, Belfort shares secrets on the most fundamental sales skill that everyone needs, no matter what you sell: Persuasion. No matter your goals, you’ll get the tips to get in front of the right people at the right time and persuade them to come around and not only give you what you want but get what they want, so everybody wins!
If you need tips on strengthening your negotiating skills or you could use some practice on closing more deals, pick up a copy of Way of the Wolf.
The Power of Broke: How Empty Pockets, a Tight Budget, and a Hunger for Success Can Become Your Greatest Competitive Advantage by Daymond John
While so many startups are on the hunt for an angel investor to write a billion-dollar check that solves all their problems, Shark Tank investor and FUBU founder Daymond John demonstrates how you can achieve success before an angel investor or a whale client ever comes knocking on your door in The Power of Broke. In this book, John shows readers how to get innovative and drive the greatest results using the least resources.
A perfect and timely read for the volatility of today’s market, The Power of Broke is an essential read to survive and thrive whether business is at an all-time high or low.
Wrap-up
By reading these sales books and implementing the strategies and techniques they teach, you can maximize your appointments, sales, and success as an SDR.
Happy reading!
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