The Best Marketing, Sales, & Negotiation Books

The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List

2008 Edition: Revised and Updated

Top MBA programs don't have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work. The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List features only the very best business books available, based on thousands of hours of research. So skip b-school and the $100,000 loan: you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.

About This Category:

The Marketing, Sales & Negotiation category will help you improve the top-line revenue of your business These books will teach you:

How to appeal to your probable purchaser.
How to maximize your sales and profit.
How to negotiate with confidence and finesse.

All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin

Creating a product is only half of the battle - to succeed, you have to capture people's attention in a way that makes them want to buy from you. In All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin explains the fundamentals of modern marketing: if you want your target market to discover and purchase your product, you must tell a consistent, authentic, believable story that fits the way they view the world.

As it turns out, good marketers aren't liars... they're excellent storytellers. People constantly tell themselves stories about what they need and why they buy. If you're able to understand your target market's worldview, tell your story in a distinctive and memorable way that fits that worldview, and fulfill their needs, you win.

Once you go beyond functional characteristics, you'll be amazed how much perception influences reality when it comes to products and services - there's value in the story that isn't present in the actual product. Is popping the cork on a 1957 bottle of Dom Perignon a delightful experience or a disgusting waste of money? Are SUVs safer than compact cars, or gas-guzzling environmental nightmares? Will a bespoke suit that's hand-cut by a tailor who serves British royalty make you look more handsome? Is a moissanite gemstone better than a diamond? Depending on the prospect's worldview, either viewpoint is valid.

In addition to foundational marketing concepts, you'll pick up useful ideas like adoption curves, framing, cognitive dissonance, the attention economy, and the all-pervading power of expectations. You can read All Marketers Are Liars in an hour or so, but you'll use the concepts it contains for the rest of your career.

Indispensable by Joe Calloway

In business, customer loyalty is priceless: the last thing you want to become is another faceless commodity. Indispensable will teach you how to achieve the "Holy Grail" of business: becoming a company your customers simply can't live without.

Joe Calloway is a marketing consultant who has studied thousands of different businesses, and he's identified five primary ways companies make themselves indispensable. (1) They are constantly improving their offering; (2) They focus on being consistent and dependable; (3) They constantly communicate with their customers; (4) They understand the long-term goals of their customers; (5) They consistently over-deliver on the expectations of their customers.

"Focus on the customer" seems like common sense, but it's rare to find a business that truly operates with the best interests of their customers in mind. The stories and case studies presented in Indispensable illustrate precisely how to impress your customers so much that they won't do business with anyone but you.

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got by Jay Abraham

Jay Abraham is a marketing legend for good reason - his advice works. If you want to attend one of Jay Abraham's seminars, be prepared to pay up to $20,000. If you don't want to spend that much, pick up Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got.

According to Mr. Abraham, there are only three fundamental ways to increase the profitability of your company: (1) increase the number of clients you serve; (2) maximize the size of each sale; (3) increase the number of purchases each client makes. If you combine these basic observations with the mindset that "it's your moral duty to do everything in your power to serve your client's best interest," you're on the road to business success.

Ultimately, you receive money in exchange for providing value to others, so focusing squarely on ways to increase the amount of value you provide to your clients is fruitful territory for exploration. You must learn how to provide that value effectively, communicate that value in a distinctive and memorable way, overcome objections to purchase, and ensure your clients are absolutely satisfied with their purchase and are excited to buy again.

Major concepts in Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got include developing a Unique Selling Proposition (USP), risk reversal, referral and affiliate programs, campaign testing, joint ventures, prospect qualification, and leverage.

Once you read Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got, you'll think about marketing in a whole new way.

The Sales Bible by Jeffrey Gitomer

According to veteran salesman Jeffrey Gitomer, "people don't want to be sold, but they love to buy." In The Sales Bible, you'll learn the personal side of sales: how to use your energy, attitude, and enthusiasm to make people want to buy what you have to offer.

This new edition of The Sales Bible is Gitomer's magnum opus: the culmination of decades of in-the-trenches sales experience. In this book, you'll learn how to get the attention of your prospects, ask useful questions, present your offerings with gusto, overcome objections, and ultimately close the sale.

The Sales Bible's list-based format and engaging, punchy tone make it perfect for repeated review. If you're struggling to make a sales call or nervous about an upcoming presentation, this book will spark ideas that you can immediately use to make the cash register ring.

The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes

Books about sales are a dime a dozen, and I've reviewed several dollars worth. Most of them try to pump you up, then give you several thousand great-sounding-but-vague-and-close-to-useless tips on how to get more prospects and close the sale. This book is different.

According to The Ultimate Sales Machine, successful selling is NOT about doing 4,000 things well - it's about flawlessly doing 12 specific things 4,000 times with "pigheaded discipline and determination."

In this book, Chet Holmes focuses squarely on the fundamentals: (1) make the best use of your limited time; (2) institute high standards and individual employee training; (3) hold regular company meetings to inform and train your employees as a group; (4) develop your core story and educate your customer; (5) attract and hire superstars; (6) target your very best prospects; (7) perfect your marketing tactics; (8) perfect your presentation; (9) perfect your company's sales process; (10) perfect your personal selling skills; (11) bond with your client via follow-through and follow-up; and (12) set aggressive goals and systematically measure your performance over time.

The Ultimate Sales Machine is one of my favorite sales books of all time for a simple reason: it's based on the author's personal experience of improving the sales of hundreds of companies over many, many years. You won't find fluffy theory in this book - just 12 clear priorities that will help you improve your profit margins and make more sales.

SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham

Not all sales are the same: tactics that result in a successful sale to an individual will often fail if used to sell to a company.

SPIN Selling will teach you a process designed to help you successfully sell high-value products and services to business buyers.

Making a large sale to a company has more to do with building respect and trust than tricky closing techniques. Backed by 12 years of research, Neil Rackham's SPIN Selling process details how to win the trust of a corporate purchaser: (1) understand the buyer's current situation; (2) understand the buyer's problems; (3) identify the implications of those problems; and (4) help the buyer internalize how much they need your help, and the ultimate payoff of working with you.

Ultimately, SPIN Selling is a book that teaches you to ask good questions that quickly expose the need while presenting your company as an attractive solution to that need. If you're selling to corporate buyers, you should read this book immediately.

Bargaining for Advantage by G. Richard Shell

No matter what you do for a living, good negotiation skills help you reach your goals quickly. Bargaining For Advantage will help you identify your negotiating style, strengths and weaknesses, identify your bargaining goals, and teach you useful tactics for getting the most out of your negotiations.

Most negotiation books focus on the extremes of bargaining relationships: heavy-handed power plays or compromise-to-keep-everyone-happy. Shell strikes a balance between getting what you want and strengthening and preserving your relationship with your negotiating partner. Bargaining is a process, and only by identifying your goals, priorities, and points of leverage will you be able to identify a solution that's acceptable to everyone involved.

Bargaining For Advantage also takes into account that more and more negotiations are being conducted remotely by phone, e-mail, or instant messaging. Negotiation in a networked world has many advantages and disadvantages that are different from face-to-face bargaining, and you'll find the recommended tactics useful as you negotiate your way to financial success.

3-D Negotiation by David A. Lax and James K. Sebenius

Once you’re at the bargaining table, 2/3 of the negotiation is already over, which means that tactics can only take you so far. In 3-D Negotiation, Lax and Sebenius teach you how to address the first two dimensions of negotiation (deal design and deal setup) before you're face-to-face with your negotiating partners.

Designing the proposed deal is the second dimension of negotiating, and it can determine success or failure. Information is king here, and accurate, detailed knowledge of your negotiation partner's position can help you create a deal that serves both of your interests while ensuring your most important needs are met.

The third and most commonly overlooked dimension of negotiation is the deal setup: "ensuring that the right parties have been approached, in the right sequence, to deal with the right issues that engage the right set of interests, at the right table, at the right time, under the right expectations, and facing the right consequences of walking away if there is no deal."

Negotiating a complex deal successfully takes planning, analysis, perseverance, critical thinking, and hard work, but by reading 3-D Negotiation and thinking through the entire deal from start-to-finish instead of obsessing about bargaining tactics, you'll have the upper hand.