22 Best Sales Books (to Read in 2023)

Staying on top of your game is the number rule specially if you are into sales.

Learn tips from these Best Sales Books as recommended by 12 experts.

The most recommended sales books are:

1. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – Robert B. Cialdini
2. How to Win Friends & Influence People – Dale Carnegie

I like the Freakanomics series by Steven D. Levitt. 

These books are so easy to read and push you to think deeper about the actions of your team and your decisions. 

The book gives new perspectives to common challenges and highlights how you can use data and numbers to really improve your decision-making process.

I love Switch by Chip Heath. 

Heath presents common change management challenges and gives tips to tackling them with stories and exercises. He shows you how to use a framework to manage the change that can be applied to almost any business situation and at any level of the organization.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone is a great read.

It takes an in-depth look into the world of Amazon and what it took for them to become arguably the world’s most powerful selling machine.

My main takeaway from the book is the idea that if you believe in something and work to create a culture of trust and hard work, you can build anything.

This book really motivated me when building out my sales team and it’s something we’ve all embraced.

I really like Delivering Happiness – the Zappos book – by Tony Hsieh. 

I read this when I was looking to make a career switch, and it reinforced my feeling that culture fit is such an important part of the search. 

It also motivates me to focus on culture as we grow our business. The book emphasizes that good culture starts with hiring the right people and giving them the tools and freedom to thrive, which is what I want for my sales team.

SPIN is an acronym for the types of questions to ask as a salesperson. Situational, problem, implication, and need-payoff. If you’re confused, you should definitely read this book!

The sales industry has obviously changed in the past decade. Customers are more informed, putting them in control. This book will teach you how to navigate the ever-changing culture of sales.

This story follows a young man joining an exclusive club of successful sales professionals. He learns a ton of key principles and so will you!

Big data can be a tough concept to comprehend.

In the book, Winning with Data, authors Tomasz Tunguz and Frank Bien outline how businesses are challenged on how to organize, manage and leverage data to get more sales.

Tunguz and Bien have great knowledge of how data is changing organizations and explain way’s that your company can take full advantage of this technological shift.

This is a great book to get the basics.  And although it touches on sales techniques, it’s actually the psychological aspect that I found so useful.

It’s hard to stay motivated and in the right mindset as a salesperson, and this book gives some wonderful techniques and tips to stay focused.

Obviously, pitching is very important in sales. Even though every salesperson probably thinks they’re a great pitcher – that skill is one of the main reasons people end up in the job. 

But in practice, there’s usually plenty to learn before you’re any good.

The book is full of anecdotes to show you the different styles of pitching, and why they work in certain situations.

If you’re in outbound sales, the first step is always figuring out where your leads are going to come from, and how to get them to respond to you. 

If you’re building a sales pipe from the beginning,  I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

A terrific book that covers everything you need to know to build a scalable sales organization that can grow fast and predictably in today’s more and more digital world.

The book is highly practical and provides you with an approach that you can pull right out of the book and implement in your own business, while still managing to explain why this is the case.

This book should be mandatory reading for every entrepreneur and sales manager.

The majority of companies that have trouble growing are in that position not because they aren’t able to sell correctly, but because they haven’t found a great fit between the product, their market and the channels and methods they use to sell.

This book helps you consider these issues while still providing you with the essentials of getting your sales model and team right.

Great and highly practical book no-nonsense guide for running a sales team. It helps you come up with an approach to sales for both yourself and your team that is highly-result oriented, action-driven and accountable for your work.

This is an oldie but still a goodie.

There’s a reason why this book still comes up in business people’s top reads. This book has stood the test of time because what’s taught in this book is “evergreen”. Meaning it’s the same principles today as it was yesterday.

This book basically teaches you how to be courteous to people. And with that, you can win their hearts (and possibly their money).

Love him or hate him he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to sales and the art of persuasion.

Putting pass the past, he’s decided to go straight and has come out with a book the shows you exactly how he approaches a sale.

He talks about body language, tonality, words to say, etc. And the main focus of this book is to show you how to get from A to B and the prospect from below a 4 in interest to above an 8 in interest as fast and as straight as possible.

If a book has sold over 15 million copies worldwide, there has to be a reason for it. Dale Carnegie’s book helps you perform better in business (and personal life) by teaching you how to use personality traits to your advantage.

Sales, management, leadership – it’s all covered. Not only that, it’s full of quirky and interesting anecdotes which makes it extremely pleasant reading.

This book might be over 2000 years old, and hardly 50(!) pages but you’ll never regret reading it.

Initially intended as a war tactics book, much of the advice within it can be translated into business. Sun Tzu achieved many successful victories in battle, apparently even successfully training Geishas into warriors, so he must have known a thing or two.

The book will teach you important elements of how to approach a project, how to analyze markets, and how to get things to work for your advantage.

Pitch Anything is a book that does a great job explaining how the human brain works and how people perceive your message.

It delivers a framework on how to shape your message for your audience and how to be persuasive in your pitch. All of the information in this book is based on research how your brain works.

Although Oren has a background in the finance industry, this approach is highly applicable for other industries where one is pitching to prospects, such as sales.

If there is one single book that changed my sales game, it is this one and was a recommended read by my first ever sales leader early in my career.

It explains the psychology of why people say, ‘Yes’ and how to apply these understandings. It is not only valuable in sales, but in everyday life. Understanding people and how to influence the decisions they make is key to success in sales. It’s a great ‘Sales 101’ read.

One of the most important parts of sales is understanding how people are influenced.

Dr. Robert Cialdini covers the psychology of why people say “yes” and how to apply these learnings to your sales process. Influence is required reading for every member of our sales and marketing team.

Best quote: “The idea of potential loss plays a large role in human decision making. In fact, people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.“

Predictable Revenue is the bible of sales. Aaron Ross highlights best practices he utilized at Salesforce to develop a predictable and repeatable sales process.

Our sales team has implemented many of the tactics and best practices Aaron writes about to streamline Goodly’s sales process.

For many years, I thought sales enablement—which I always wrote in lower case—was a Marketing function. For the fast-growing B2B tech companies we worked with, our job as marketers was to know the customer better than anybody else and then give the people in sales what they needed to engage target buyers.

My opinions on who owns sales enablement changed when I got hold of this excellent book. Thirty pages into the book, I needed some clarity on what world-class Sales Enablement looked like, and the book gave me exactly that with its thoughtful Sales Force Enablement Clarity Model, which is when I humbly realized that Sales Enablement is so much more than “Marketing helping Sales to be successful” and is a discipline unto itself.

Related: Best Marketing Books for Beginners

It’s a very interesting hearing success stories since everyone’s had their own road. Ken truly is the American dream and it’s inspiring to read about his grit and perseverance. As a founder with a sales background, it helps put things in my own journey into perspective.

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