Ask HN: a good book on sales?

4 points by Lucadg ↗ HN
Can you suggest any good book about sales targeted specifically to people, like many of us here on HN, who love creating and do not love selling? I've checked Amazon but reviews are written by all kind of people, you suggestions would much more valuable. That moment has come for me and I really need to get into the salesman mindset. Not easy. Thank you!

4 comments

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Try one of the Grant Cardone books. He is really good and is a New York Times best selling author. Check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDz9A9g5eNw

Remember that while selling something, the person who believes in his point of view less, gets sold. So, believe in your product. Sell your customers a pain killer, solve their problems.

I hope you succeed buddy!! Enthusiasm is the key.!! (notice all the exclamation marks)

Thanks! I had a look and seems interesting.
If you're thinking about doing a company and you want a sense of how sales works at various stages of a company, a quick and amusing read is _Selling The Wheel_. It won't teach you to sell, but it will teach you what kinds of people you'd hire to sell.

I've read a bunch of sales-y books but nothing I've read in them really stuck. But: most of what you need to know about early-stage sales is embedded in _Four Steps To The Epiphany_, which is ostensibly a book about validating a market but also has a guidebook for engaging prospective customers to see if your idea is any good, which is 99.9% of the "sales" you'll do before you get traction and hire someone else to do it.

Good accompaniments for any books you read on sales are Cialdini's _Influence_ (it's also tremendously readable) and Trout & Ries _Positioning_, which will help you decide what you're selling and how to describe it.

When you're getting started, the hardest thing to learn is to ask for the sale and to not take rejection personally. Both of those ideas are as simple as they seem, and both are very difficult to learn. If you find a book that teaches that to you effectively, let us know about it.

Thanks! I think I will go with Steve's _Four Steps To The Epiphany_ as it seems what I need right now.