The 7 Best Books For Entry-Level Salespeople

Sales books provide a glimpse into the mind of another individual without the need for them to actively share their time. Their knowledge and experiences have already been eternally transcribed within the pages of their books for anyone to read at their leisure. Unfortunately, sales happens to be one of those things that you’d expect to be fairly straightforward but aren’t in practice. For that reason, we’ve listed five essential sales books for beginners. Study these to build a robust and powerful foundation for your sales career!

1. How to Win Friends & Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

This book is an absolute classic and a must-read for any sales professional. It’s probably the book you’ll hear referred to the most throughout your career. It’s simply that powerful. Though written over 80 years ago, much of the advice in his book still holds to this day. The book deals mainly with how to best communicate with other people by avoiding potential conflicts and proactively working to make a good impression. As such, this can be an excellent read for all kinds of folks, not just those working in sales. Anyone who deals with people for a living would benefit greatly from reading the teachings of Dale Carnegie.

Check it out – How To Win Friends And Influence People

2. Secrets of Closing the Sale, by Zig Zigler

Zig Zigler is a renowned author, sales coach, and motivational speaker. If you do a quick YouTube search for his name, you’ll find a long list of videos from his speeches, interviews, or other segments where he’s given his knowledge and advice to others. If you have the time to look through a few of them, it may be worth your time, but his book will undoubtedly provide you with strategies and guidelines to make you as persuasive as possible. It’s also a relatively quick read, so it would be worth adding to the reading list for those looking for a new book to get through.

Check it out – Secrets of Closing the Sale

3. To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, by Daniel H. Pink

Here we have another book that seems to get a lot of love and attention from many professionals in the world of sales. I’ve heard this book gets mentioned in conversations on several occasions from various networking events. Having only been published in 2012, it’s a very recent book as well.

Within its pages, Pink talks about the correlation between persuasion and selling. He also outlines that regardless of your profession, a challenge that comes up quite frequently in life is the ability to effectively persuade someone else of an idea. Whether it’s getting children to do their homework or convincing a significant other to eat at a restaurant of your choosing, there is always an element of persuasion or selling necessary. Thus, Pink can derive the name of his book from this basic principle.

Check it out – To Sell is Human

4. Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely

Now this book doesn’t mainly focus on the art of sales or how to improve your persuasion directly. Still, it provides some fascinating insights into common mistakes most people have in their thinking. For example, Dan Ariely proves in a series of experiments that although, in theory, you would think that everyone would make the most rational decision in every situation, that’s not the case. Even more so, people seem to make the same irrational decisions predictably.

If you’re interested in learning about these common falsehoods in people’s thinking, possibly even your own, this is another excellent book to add to your reading list. As a quick bonus, if you want more from Dan Ariely and his research, he recently published another book called Payoff, which dives into the hidden logic of things that shapes our motivation.

Check it out – Predictably Irrational

5. SPIN Selling, by Neil Rackham

This book will likely provide you with some of the most tactical advice you can use immediately in your sales career. The book is titled after the selling methodology of the same name it evangelizes. SPIN is an acronym for Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff. Each part of the acronym relates to the different questions you should be asking to help build interest in your product or service within the prospect and effectively guide them through the sales process.

Many of you are likely already familiar with the BANT criteria for validating a sale. This is essentially taking that concept and flipping it on its head, where you can now use the same criteria to validate the sale to the prospect rather than to yourselves internally.

Check it out – SPIN Selling

6. New Sales Simplified: The Essential Handbook for Prospecting and New Business Development, by Mike Weinberg

Mike Weinberg runs his own sales consultancy, and it is safe to say that he knows something about sales. He played a pivotal part in the successful growth of SlimFast in the early days, a story he talks about within his book. But, outside of his successful sales journey and the experiences that helped guide him to where he is today, he outlines an excellent framework that’s easy to follow and leverage.

He provides best practices to productively kick off your sales process with ideas and tactics that have served him and his many clients well over the last several years. He goes over everything in great detail, from approaching the prospecting process to getting mentally prepared to hit the phone with the right message. This is a must-read for newer sales professionals and a great refresher even for those who are more seasoned.

Check it out – New Sales Simplified

7. Hacking Sales, by Max Altschuler

Max Altschuler was a crucial player in the explosive growth of Udemy. He explains the process he used to prioritize his prospects and key community members to get things going quickly during the infancy stages of the company. He’s since had a very successful career providing consulting work and founding an organization known as Sales Hacker. Like Mike Weinberg, Max took his advice and wrote this book for all salespeople to benefit from. He presents his ideas in a very understandable fashion. In addition, he offers more specific tactics around the sales technology tools available on the market and how to use them to your advantage effectively.

Check it out – Hacking Sales

Recap: 7 Essential Sales Books For Beginners

Of course, this is not to say that these are the only sales books worth reading. You can read tons of other books to improve your ability to sell, like Predictable Revenue, Think and Grow Rich, The New Strategic Selling, The Challenger Sale, Endless referrals, and so many more. In addition, some books can teach you to be a better sales coach or leader, like Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions. Honestly, the list of books you can read in this realm can go on and on. This list should be a great starting point for your new sales reading journey. Finishing these seven books should give you a solid foundational understanding of thinking about and executing your selling ability.