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    How to Sell More: Tools and Techniques from Harvard Business Review
    How to Sell More: Tools and Techniques from Harvard Business Review
    How to Sell More: Tools and Techniques from Harvard Business Review
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    How to Sell More: Tools and Techniques from Harvard Business Review

    By Harvard Business Review

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    About this ebook

    Over the last decade, technology has dramatically changed the role of salespeople at companies of all sizes. But one crucial fact remains: Sales is the most vital function of every business.

    In How to Sell More, the editors of Harvard Business Review have gathered advice from some of the world’s top business professors, consultants, trainers, and sales managers. In these collected essays, you’ll learn how to:

    Effectively recruit, train, manage, and support these key employees
    Use smart pricing, promotions, and incentives to make your sales team more successful
    Avoid the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make when pursuing their first sales
    Master the daily challenges of selling, from planning a sales call to handling a potential customer’s toughest questions

    More than most workers, salespeople perform in a field where success is easily measured: How much did you sell today, this week, this quarter? If you’re looking for ways to bump up those numbers, this book offers you valuable insights and practical tools.

    HBR Singles provide brief yet potent business ideas, in digital form, for today's thinking professional.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarvard Business Review Press
    Release dateFeb 26, 2013
    ISBN9781422196304
    How to Sell More: Tools and Techniques from Harvard Business Review
    Author

    Harvard Business Review

    Harvard Business Review es sin lugar a dudas la referencia más influyente en el sector editorial en temas de gestión y desarrollo de personas y de organizaciones. En sus publicaciones participan investigadores de reconocimiento y prestigio internacional, lo que hace que su catálogo incluya una gran cantidad de obras que se han convertido en best-sellers traducidos a múltiples idiomas.

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    Reviews for How to Sell More

    3.5/5

    12 ratings3 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Would of love more graphics information with pictures and examples.
    • 5/5
      Great insights that i encourage more members to read many times
    • 4/5
      This book is very familiar with the practice in B2B. Actually, I see my self in most cases and learn from that.

    Book preview

    How to Sell More - Harvard Business Review

    http://pressbooks.com.

    Introduction

    Among the disciplines that make up the field of management, sales rarely gets the respect it deserves. If a business does a perfect job of designing its products and services, the theory goes, who needs salespeople? As Peter Drucker wrote: The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous . . . to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.

    In fact, as the essays in this collection make clear, selling remains a vital function in the vast majority of companies. Technology has made many products more complicated, creating the need for salespeople to educate consumers on their uses. In the B2B world, the shift to services has created a move away from simple transactional relationships between buyers and sellers; instead, companies need to nurture long-lasting relationships with customers, with salespeople often serving critical roles as stewards of those relationships. Feedback gathered by salespeople can serve as a powerful engine of innovation. And as anyone who’s worked in a corporate setting near the end of a quarter knows, salespeople remain the key to the revenue growth that’s so important to many managers and investors. While there will always be a select group of simple products that sell themselves, in many industries, good salespeople remain a big determinant of company performance.

    So how do you effectively recruit, train, manage, and support these key employees? How do you use smart pricing, promotions, and incentives to make them more successful? And how should salespeople attack the daily tasks of their profession, from planning a sales call to handling a potential customer’s toughest questions?

    These questions—and many more—are addressed in the essays that follow, which began as a series of blog posts on HBR.org, the website of Harvard Business Review.

    While both physical and virtual bookstores abound with volumes of sales advice, this collection offers two distinct advantages. First, unlike single-author works, this collection features a variety of viewpoints by writers with diverse expertise. Second, unlike sales advice drawn primarily from hard-won experience, many of these essays draw on rigorous quantitative research into what really works (and what doesn’t), done by researchers at some of the world’s best universities and sales consultancies.

    More than most workers, salespeople perform in a field where success is easily judged: How much did you sell today, this week, or this quarter? In that pursuit, we hope that HBR’s authors and the advice in How to Sell More offer valuable tools to drive success.

     —THE EDITORS

    The Most Important Predictor of Sales Success

    By Philip Delves Broughton 

    Philip Delves Broughton is the author of The Art of the Sale and writes regularly for the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Spectator.

    No profession in business has a more complex reputation than sales. When we think of salespeople—from Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman to Donald Trump to Steve Jobs—all kinds of contradictory ideas and images jangle in our minds. They can be persuaders and bullies, seducers and rogues, dream-makers and charlatans. But without them, no business exists.

    It’s not just salespeople who must sell. Entrepreneurs must persuade others of the value of an idea or company which has yet to take concrete form. CEOs must convince the board, markets, employees, and customers that what they are doing is valuable. Politicians, artists, and scientists all must sell themselves and their work in order to succeed.

    Sales is the most human and richly nuanced aspect of business and yet, amazingly, is not even a required course at most business schools. MBA students are dutifully taught finance, strategy, and operations as if revenue appeared by magic and salespeople were at best a necessary evil.

    But as one great salesman told me, sales is the greatest laboratory there is for understanding human nature. So while researching my book The Art of the Sale, I set off on a trip to meet salespeople around the world, in different cultures and different fields of selling, to understand not only what they did, but also what went on in their minds as they did it.

    I began my journey in a Moroccan souk, an ancient marketplace where people must look each other in the eye over a pile of goods and decide whether to buy or sell, without the cover of email or conference calls. Abdelmajid Rais El Fenni, one of the most successful carpet and rug traders in Tangiers, explained how he coped with the daily rejections and petty humiliations every salesman must face.

    You are like a beggar in sales, asking again and again all day, he said. "The salesman should have loose robes. You never get upset. Of course, sometimes you have customers and you want to kill them. But you’re not allowed

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