10 Books to Guarantee Your Success in Sales Situations

Author

Matt Karamazov
September 16, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 27 minutes

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To make the most money possible in sales, you have to understand just one thing.

What you absolutely MUST know can be summed up in the following quote:

"You can get anything you want in life, just as long as you help enough other people get what they want."

That quote from Zig Ziglar changed my life more than a decade ago, and much of the success I've had in business can be traced back to learning that one crucial lesson.

Every single person on Earth has problems. If you solve those problems in an impeccable manner, you will be rewarded financially for that.

It's actually very simple:

If you want to make more money, help more people!

To make a million, help a million.

That's what so many people miss, and it keeps them poor for their entire lives. They're thinking about themselves, and what's in it for them, when actually, success in sales is all about being helpful to others.

Today’s books will help you practice this (and much, much more), and set you up for all the sales success that you desire.

There are also two books not listed here that I want to mention too, because they’re excellent sales books. One I mention in this Instagram post, and the other is Selling From Your Comfort Zone, by Stacey Hall. I highly recommend both!

Oh yes, and one more thing…

I made a recent guest appearance on The Compounding Project podcast! We talked about all kinds of things, like how I built a successful business on Instagram, my note-taking process that I’ve used to read and learn from 1,300+ books, and more.

Check it out on YouTube if you’re so inclined!

In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Got:

We’ve got lots to learn today, so let’s hit the books!

“It comes down to the simple but no less profound truth that effortful learning changes the brain, building new connections and capability.

This single fact - that our intellectual abilities are not fixed from birth but are, to a considerable degree, ours to shape - is a resounding answer to the nagging voice that too often asks us, 'Why bother?'

We make the effort because the effort itself extends the boundaries of our abilities. What we do shapes who we become and what we're capable of doing. The more we do, the more we can do."

-Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel, Make It Stick (Complete Breakdown Here)

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“By using our superior intelligence, we have created such a complicated world that we have to resort to the decision-making processes of the animals we once transcended.”

-Robert B. Cialdini, Influence

This is one of the must-read classics of persuasion and it’s pretty much been the gold standard for books on that subject ever since it came out in 1984. I’m generally distrustful of new books from people who claim to have found a “new paradigm” or whatever when it comes to influence – save your time and your money and just buy this one book. 

The seven universal principles of persuasion that he covers in depth are: reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, and unity, and once you have those covered, you have a decent idea of why people do pretty much anything and how you can influence their behavior to align with what you want them to do. 

Influence, like The 48 Laws of Power, is amoral – meaning, it’s not the material itself but what you do with it. You could use it to become an evil genius, or you could use it to inspire positive change in both yourself and your community. The principles can be used either way. The choice, as always, is yours.

“Empathy is not about being nice or agreeing with the other side. It's about understanding them. Empathy helps us learn the position the enemy is in, why their actions make sense (to them), and what might move them."

-Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference

I’ll make a deal with you: you read this book summary to the end, and I’ll teach you some of the most astonishing tactics I’ve learned from the former lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI, Chris Voss, for getting exactly what you want in the giant negotiation that is your life.

While we discuss this book, I want you to feel like you are being treated fairly at all times. So please stop me at any time if you feel I'm being unfair, and we'll address it (that’s one of the magical phrases you’ll learn, and Voss will teach you exactly why it works so tremendously well).

Alright, so that opening joke was funny for about two paragraphs, but seriously: you can get almost anything you want in life; you just have to learn how to ask correctly. That’s exactly what you’ll learn here, and how you’ll learn to think once you internalize some of the lessons from this book.

Negotiation is simply the art of letting someone have your way, and the days of threatening people with grievous physical harm, or trying to otherwise dominate them are over.

Sophisticated negotiators don’t work like that anymore, relying as they do on empathy, active listening, and all that other stuff that doesn’t make for great TV, but that gets real hostages in the real world back to their real families with all their real parts intact.

“Today’s most valuable currency is social capital, defined as the information, expertise, trust, and total value that exist in the relationships you have and social networks to which you belong.”

-Keith Ferrazzi, Never Eat Alone

Connection and relationship are the law of the universe, and this book will help you put that law into action to build a powerful network that will help you realize your greatest ambitions.

Never Eat Alone is one of the greatest networking books ever written - a certified classic - but it's not literally all about who you have dinner with. Not completely. It's so much more than that, and Keith uses both his own story and the stories of influential power connectors like Katherine Graham, Bill Clinton, and Dale Carnegie to illustrate his best tactics for gaining influence by being valuable to others and cultivating your network.

It's about becoming valuable to the people you're connected to and being a resource for them, someone your whole network can rely on to help them get things done. It's about winning yourself, while making sure that, at the same time, your friends are winning too.

Now is the most exciting time to be alive in the history of the planet, and more opportunities than ever exist today, both to get everything you ever wanted and to help other people do the same.

“Success will not wait. If I delay she will become betrothed to another and lost to me forever. This is the time. This is the place. I am the man. I will act now.”

-Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman in the World

Og Mandino (great name, eh?) went from being a depressed, divorced alcoholic on the verge of suicide to selling more than 50,000,000 books, and this is one of my absolute favorite books of all time.

Not just one of my favorite sales books, but favorite books. Period.

The main message of the book is to “do it now.” 

Yesterday is past, tomorrow may never arrive, and if you waste today, you waste “the last page of your life.” “These hours are now my eternity,” Mandino says. Incredible. If Marcus Aurelius was an insurance salesman, he’d probably write something like this!

“The best method of selling I’ve ever seen is when you can guide your prospects through a series of questions and they sell themselves on your product or service.”

-Chet Holmes, The Ultimate Sales Machine

The Dream 100 method was pioneered by Chet Holmes, and this classic business book has at least 5 more strategies and ideas like it that are almost as valuable to the success of your business as that one is.

You cannot skip this book if you want to increase your business profits over the next year. Or even the next month! It’ll teach you management skills, sales skills, organizational skills, public relations skills…the fundamentals!

Get these right and you’ll never have to worry about lead flow ever again.

“The worst time to think about the thing you are going to say is in the moment you are saying it. This book prepares you for nearly every known eventuality and provides you with a fair advantage in almost every conversation.”

-Phil M. Jones, Exactly What to Say

This is a fantastically useful handbook of words, phrases, and psychological tools that will give you a fair advantage in sales, business, and the world at large. 

Sometimes - often - the difference between a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ is knowing exactly what to say, when to say it, and how to say it. What you never want to do, though, is head into any important conversation unprepared. And honestly, this book has something helpful for basically every situation that you could ever encounter in your life.

That’s quite an achievement for a 90-something-page book!

Having this knowledge of human psychology, effortless persuasion, and effective speech patterns honestly feels like some sort of cheat code.

My advice - after having been involved in hundreds (thousands) of important, high-stakes conversations, is to return to this book often, and practice bringing some of these words and ideas into one or two conversations of yours throughout the week until they feel natural. Until you just know…exactly what to say.

“The world is full of people who continue to do the same thing over and over, even though it produces unsatisfactory results each and every time.”

-Dr. Maxwell Maltz, Zero Resistance Selling

Maxwell Maltz also wrote Psycho-Cybernetics, one of the most transformational personal development books I’ve ever read and one that I recommend pretty much constantly.

This one could never stand up to Psycho-Cybernetics, but it’s great for what it is, a book about how you can apply the same principles to the business of selling, and thereby achieve much greater results. 

Zero-Resistance Selling, like the former book, is about reprogramming your own self-image to help you break through the barriers holding you back from hitting your sales targets and achieving your career goals. It also covers ground that most other sales books miss. 

There are better tactical sales books out there. Let me just say that.

But none of the tactics will work for you if you show up to sales calls in a dead panic, a bundle of nerves subconsciously signaling “I have absolutely no confidence in myself” the whole time you’re trying to stumble through your sales presentation.

So once you’re finished reading Psycho-Cybernetics, definitely pick up this one next.

“Three things have to line up in your customer’s mind before you have a shot at closing them. They are called the Three Tens, the context being that they rank in certainty from one to ten. They are: the product, the trust and connection they feel with you, and their opinion about the company you work for or run.”

-Jordan Belfort, Way of the Wolf

Yeah, Jordan Belfort from The Wolf of Wall Street wrote a book…and it’s good! Like, really good. I’m not sure that I buy the whole “I’ve changed” speech he gives in the introduction, but none of that should matter to you if you’re just looking to read a book that will make you a boatload of sales. 

I make fun, but this is a seriously great book on sales where the Wolf himself lays out his step-by-step sales and persuasion system called “Straight Line Selling.”

Also important to understand are what he calls “The Three Tens,” which are three things that have to be at a 10/10 level if you want to reliably close even the toughest prospects. 

Over the course of the book you’ve got the ultra tactical stuff like what to say when, how to say it, what kind of tone and vocal modulations you’re going for, etc. Then he’s also got the higher-level overview of what you’re looking to achieve on a broader scale with respect to strategy, guiding principles, etc.

Everything he covers displays this deep, almost intuitive (yet learnable) knowledge of what makes people buy and what makes you irresistible.

“If you can’t pass the simple test of being willing to buy your own product, you’ll never be able to sell others in large numbers. You have power when you’re sitting at the closing table and can look the prospect dead in the eye and show him that you’ve already made the exact same purchase that you’re asking him to make.”

-Grant Cardone, Sell or Be Sold

One of Grant Cardone’s biggest goals is to be mentioned by name everywhere people are talking about sales and selling. He wants the name “Cardone” to be synonymous with sales (and ubiquitous in the marketplace), and that’s the kind of energy that animates this entire book.

He’s also kind of a polarizing figure, and I won’t blame you at all if his style rubs you the wrong way. Believe me, I totally get it!

I first heard of Grant Cardone when I picked up his book, The 10X Rule, which completely redefined what I thought about hard work, and clarified for me exactly the kind of work ethic and effort that would be required to hit my goals.

That book shaped my beliefs about commitment and discipline and achievement, and it’s no exaggeration to say that it changed my life. 

This book, Sell or Be Sold, could absolutely be life-changing for the right person, and if you’re in sales (hint: we’re all in sales), then I believe it’s pretty much required reading. 

I mean, here you’ve got a world-class salesperson - mega successful, mega talented, mega-everything - and he’s just spilling all his sales secrets onto the page where you can pick them up basically for free. That’s a pretty sweet deal!

“For better or worse, people will give more minutes of attention to something they find entertaining and amusing than they will to anything serious. To sell whatever it is you sell, however you sell it, to the max, you are in show biz. So you might as well get good at it.”

-Dan S. Kennedy, Make ‘Em Laugh & Take Their Money

For what is essentially a joke book, this one is worth reading for anyone who wants to inject a little humor and fun into their sales and/or speaking presentations. Which you probably should, since as Dan Kennedy points out, people buy more, and buy more happily when in good humor. 

There’s more to it of course than just jokes, although there’s a healthy amount of those in here too. It’s really a book about understanding humor of many varieties, and how its skillful use can separate the highest-earning salespeople and speakers from their decidedly un-funny counterparts. 

Now, you’d think that a book breaking down the structure of effective jokes would strip the humor right out of them, but Dan Kennedy doesn’t.

He lays out different types of humor and jokes, why and where they work (and don’t work), and expert tips and strategies on making presentations of all kinds more compelling and fun. But the way he does it isn’t stuffy or dull or anything like that. It’s also not full of fluff.

Serious where it has to be, funny where it can be, this book will show you how and why “funny” is good business.

Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!

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More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!

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With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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