Has anyone read a great book on selling/sales lately?

March 11, 2010 12:03 PM

Has anyone read a great book on selling/sales lately?

There's so much crap out there to wade through.

posted by tangyraspberry to Work & Money (3 answers total)

SPIN Selling, and it's follow up, Major Account Sales Strategy. Those two, along with How to Win Friends and Influence People, are the only sales books you'll ever need.
posted by COD at 12:13 PM on March 11, 2010

I always thought SPIN selling was for big ticket items, stuff where you're selling not just a product (wham, bam, thank you ma'am) where you could piss off the customer as long as they got their product & left, but for items where you're selling an ongoing relationship.

When I worked at [big multinational bank] I saw it lying around the office, presumably someone bought it for all the bankers, so I took it fairly seriously after that. Never actually read it, though, but a copy of it (from big multinational bank) sits on my bookshelf.

So - I think you need to clarify what type of sales you're talking about.
posted by MesoFilter at 1:36 PM on March 11, 2010

What they discovered in the research that led to SPIN Selling is that big ticket or complex sales require some different techniques than a one call close type of sale. The basic idea of understanding how and when to ask situation, problem, implication, and need-analysis questions is important either way. IIRC, for the simpler sales you focused more on problem questions, and once you understood the problem you could explain how your widget solves the problem, and close. For complex sales, you spend much more time getting into the implications of the problems, and building a much more robust value prop to justify the sale.
posted by COD at 5:19 PM on March 11, 2010