The sales profession is in the midst of a perfect storm. Buyers have more power - more information, more at stake, and more control over the sales process - than any time in history. Technology is bringing disruptive change at an ever-increasing pace, creating fear and uncertainty that leaves buyers clinging to the status quo.

People don't buy from people they like. No! Your buyer doesn't care about you or your product or service. It's not your job to overcome objections, it's your buyer's. Closing isn't a skill of good salespeople; it's the skill of weak salespeople. Price isn't the main reason salespeople lose the sale. Gap Selling shreds traditional and closely held sales beliefs that have been hurting salespeople for decades. For years, salespeople have embraced a myriad of sales tactics and belief systems that have unknowingly created many of the issues they have been trying to avoid.

They actually have vastly different styles and backgrounds. Yet despite their differences, great managers share one common trait: They don’t hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. They don’t believe that, with enough training, a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They don’t try to help people overcome their weaknesses. And, yes, they even play favorites. In this longtime management bestseller, Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its massive in-depth study of great managers.

Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer a simple, four-step method for hiring with confidence, designed for everyone from the CEO on down. Who shows you how to avoid the most common pitfalls of hiring, how to identify "A Players" - people who can perform their job better than 90 percent of the candidates in their field - and how to make sure the best candidate will be excited to join your organization.

The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades.

What do How to Win Friends and Influence People and Sell! have in common (other than Dale Carnegie)? They're both based on the premise that relationships are what matter. In this age where media is social and funding is raised by crowds, the sales cycle has permanently changed. It's no longer enough to know your product, nor always appropriate to challenge your customer's thinking based on your online research. In Sell!: The Way Your Customers Want to Buy, Dale Carnegie & Associates reveal the real modern sales cycle.

Persuasion is not a sales skill - it’s a blunt instrument of last resort that sellers use when they don’t know how to influence the choices their buyers make. It’s the weapon of choice for mindless, uninspired sellers: the sales zombies who have stopped learning and stopped improving. Wouldn’t you rather learn how to master the art of selling in, by listening to what your buyers really want?

Businesses everywhere are plagued by managers who seem to think that keeping their staff miserable is the best way to deliver profits. This is a failure of leadership that also hurts the bottom line; research has shown that maintaining a happy, engaged workforce consistently drives measurably better business results across the board. In When They Win, You Win, Russ Laraway, the Chief People Officer at Qualtrics, provides a simple, coherent, and complete leadership standard that teaches organizational planners and managers how to develop incredible levels of employee engagement.

No matter how much repeat business you get from loyal customers, the lifeblood of your business is a constant flow of new accounts. Packed with tested strategies and anecdotes, New Sales. Simplified. offers a proven formula for prospecting, developing, and closing deals. With refreshing honesty and some much-needed humor, sales expert Mike Weinberg examines the critical mistakes made by most salespeople and executives, then provides tips to help you achieve the opposite results.

With the explosion of social media, the competition for attention - and customers - is more intense than ever before. Standing out is not only more challenging than ever, it now has less of an impact on sustained growth. To be a lasting company, leader, or brand on a positive trajectory today, one must become iconic. Award-winning author and speaker Scott McKain examines what an iconic organization or leader is and helps you attain and retain that rare status. If your company has slipped in its standing, McKain teaches you how you can regain your position.

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.

While a Vice President at Salesforce, David Priemer had an epiphany: The very sales tactics his team was using were not working on him. While the company — and his entire profession — was acting with more than enough gusto, they lacked emotional awareness and empathy. Put simply: They were not selling the way they buy.

In Elite Sales Strategies, expert sales leader Anthony Iannarino offers his philosophy about becoming a commercial success. This guidebook provides unique insights into how to approach every sale by serving your clients from a position of authority and expertise.

In sales, the worst thing you can hear from a customer isn’t “no.” It’s “I need to think about it.” When this happens, deeply entrenched business advice says to double down on your efforts to sell a buyer on all the ways they might win by choosing you and your business. But this approach backfires dramatically. Why? Because it completely gets wrong the primary driver behind purchasing decision-making: once purchase intent is established, customers no longer care about succeeding. What they really care about is not failing.

If you're one of the six million people who work in the fast-paced, high-stress world of complex sales, you want the latest strategies and skills for success. This practical guide gives you the tools to take your sales game, your communication skills, and your career to the next level of success. Exceptional Selling features street-level straight talk about the one-on-one skills that professionals need to succeed.

The sales profession is in the midst of a perfect storm. Buyers have more power - more information, more at stake, and more control over the sales process - than any time in history. Technology is bringing disruptive change at an ever-increasing pace, creating fear and uncertainty that leaves buyers clinging to the status quo.

Selling is tougher than ever before. Potential customers are under extreme pressure to do more with less money, less time, and fewer resources, and they're wary of anyone who tries to get them to buy or change anything. Under such extreme conditions, yesterday's sales strategies no longer work. Sales strategist Jill Konrath tells you how to overcome obstacles, get more appointments, speed up decisions, and win sales with today's short-fused, frazzled customers.

In their acclaimed best seller The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB busted many longstanding myths about sales. Now they've turned their research and analysis to a new vital business subject - customer loyalty - with a new book that turns the conventional wisdom on its head. The idea that companies must delight customers by exceeding service expectations is so entrenched that managers rarely even question it. They devote untold time, energy, and resources to trying to dazzle people and inspire their undying loyalty.

Powerful strategies for sales proficiency in ever-changing situations. When sales people are promoted, change jobs, or face new business environments, they inevitably need to learn new skills quickly. Their livelihoods depend on getting up to speed quickly; their bosses have no patience for delayed results

Anthony Iannarino never set out to become a salesman. He fell into his profession by accident, and now has turned his focus to a question that's been debated for at least a century: Why are a small number of salespeople in any field hugely successful, while the rest are stuck with mediocre results at best? Since then, and for over 25 years, he has read hundreds of books, tested countless strategies, and interviewed dozens of the best salespeople to figure out what sets the extraordinary ones apart from the rest.

Over the past decade, Inbound Marketing has changed the way companies earn buyers’ trust and build their brands - through meaningful, helpful content. But with that change comes unprecedented access to information in a few quick keystrokes. Enter the age of the empowered buyer, one who no longer has to rely on a sales rep to research their challenges or learn more about how a company’s offering might fit their needs. Now, with more than 60 percent of purchasing decisions made in the absence of a sales rep, the role of the rep itself has been called into question.

Listening is harder than it looks - but it's the difference between business success and failure. Nothing causes bad decisions in organizations as often as poor listening. But Bernard Ferrari, adviser to some of the nation's most influential executives, believes that such missteps can be avoided and that the skills and habits of good listening can be developed and mastered. He offers a step-by-step process that will help you become an active listener, able to shape and focus any conversation.

Drawing on case studies, many from client companies, the authors show how to establish clear expectations and manage the unmet expectations that inevitably occur. And they offer a positive, principled way that engages hearts and minds. This book can help people at every level---from senior executives to front-line workers---enjoy greater productivity, profitability, and job satisfaction.

Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer a simple, four-step method for hiring with confidence, designed for everyone from the CEO on down. Who shows you how to avoid the most common pitfalls of hiring, how to identify "A Players" - people who can perform their job better than 90 percent of the candidates in their field - and how to make sure the best candidate will be excited to join your organization.

They actually have vastly different styles and backgrounds. Yet despite their differences, great managers share one common trait: They don’t hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. They don’t believe that, with enough training, a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They don’t try to help people overcome their weaknesses. And, yes, they even play favorites. In this longtime management bestseller, Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its massive in-depth study of great managers.

Everyone recognizes leaders with "presence." They stand out for their seemingly innate ability to command attention and inspire commitment. But what is this secret quality they exude, exactly? Executive and CEO coach Kristi Hedges demystifies this elusive trait, revealing that leadership presence is the intersection of outward influencing skills and internal mental conditioning. Using her I-Presence model, the author shows how anyone-regardless of position or personality-can strengthen their impact.

Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie educate listeners on one of the hottest trends in business development: "design thinking", or the ability to turn abstract ideas into practical applications for maximal business growth. Jeanne Liedtka's recent book, The Catalyst: How YOU Can Lead Extraordinary Growth, was named a Top Innovation and Design Thinking Book by Business Week. Tim Ogilvie has been hailed as a visionary for his pioneering contributions to service innovation, business model innovation, and customer experience design.

Anthony Iannarino has a different approach to closing geared to the new technological and social realities of our time. In The Lost Art of Closing, he proves that the final commitment can actually be one of the easiest parts of the sales process - if you've set it up properly with other commitments that have to happen long before the close. The key is to lead customers through a series of necessary steps designed to prevent a purchase stall.

How do you break through to impossible-to-reach executive buyers who are intent on blocking out the noise that confronts them every day? Old-school prospecting tactics or new-school techniques alone won't provide the answers. But Combo Prospecting will...by showing how to combine time-tested sales processes with cutting-edge social media strategies and clever technology hacks.

What if you can successfully coach anyone in 15, five, or even 60 seconds using one question? Sales Leadership makes delivering consistent, high-impact coaching easy. For busy, caring managers, this removes the pressure and misconception that, "Coaching is difficult, doesn't work, and I don't have time to coach." Since most managers don't know how to coach, they become part of the non-stop, problem-solving legion of frustrated Chief Problem Solvers who habitually do other's work, create dependency, and nourish the seed of mediocrity.