Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm Bosworth/Holland's Customer-Centric Selling
Crossing the Chasm is a good book, but as a sales book for a freelancer?
Ask HN: Sales book recommendation?
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Re: Ask HN: Sales book recommendation?
#12How to Win Friends & Influence People (http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/06...) - Seriously.
Re: Ask HN: Sales book recommendation?
#13Be sure to keep your mentality, don't adopt the sales mentality where you just try to make as many sales as possible. If you're not making enough, maybe you should charge more for services, while at the same time improving the quality of work. In web design and programming, I always put quality above quantity. If you do a great job, your service will sell itself by word of mouth.
Re: Ask HN: Sales book recommendation?
#14"Go for No"
Incorrect model: Success Failure Correct model: Me ---> Failure ---> Success
More about the book:
Re: Ask HN: Sales book recommendation?
#15* SPIN Selling by Rackman * The Sales Bible by Gitomer * Selling to VITO by Parinello * Lead Generation for the Complex Sale by Brian Carroll * http://www.marketingsherpa.com/ * http://blog.startwithalead.com/weblog/ * http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=35771&trk=a... This one is a linekdin group that sends out a good email news letter
If you had to pick just one?
Re: Ask HN: Sales book recommendation?
#16Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm Bosworth/Holland's Customer-Centric Selling
Crossing the Chasm is a good book, but as a sales book for a freelancer?
Definitely - if you don't understand the market, the motivations for purchasing, the product development lifecycle and so on, how can you possibly sell anything beyond brute force and willpower?
Re: Ask HN: Sales book recommendation?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crossing the Chasm is a good book, but as a sales book for a freelancer?
Definitely - if you don't understand the market, the motivations for purchasing, the product development lifecycle and so on, how can you possibly sell anything beyond brute force and willpower?
If you're selling your time, you are pretty much selling 'brute force' by definition, rather than a product.
Re: Ask HN: Sales book recommendation?
#18I'm a freelancer in web dev and show biz and have done a lot of sales in that area. Brian Tracey's "Advanced Selling Strategies" is probably the best single book out there for individual one-on-one selling, especially if you also read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" 80% of reviewers on Amazon gave it 5 stars, and the rest 4. That's saying something for a business book!
I would also highly recommend finding good books on negotiation too. Balancing relationship sales with negotiation and estimation is IMHO the hardest and most far-reaching aspect of being a freelance web dev.
Iain Duncan
Re: Ask HN: Sales book recommendation?
#19Be sure to keep your mentality, don't adopt the sales mentality where you just try to make as many sales as possible. If you're not making enough, maybe you should charge more for services, while at the same time improving the quality of work. In web design and programming, I always put quality above quantity. If you do a great job, your service will sell itself by word of mouth.
This is totally true, with one giant caveat: how much you are worth will not sell itself. You will get referrals, but you need to make sure that you are negotiating properly or you can wind up swamped with work that you aren't charging enough for. Sooo, even if you feel like you have all the work you need, you owe it to yourself to do some sales reading. ;-)
Re: Ask HN: Sales book recommendation?
#20If I could choose one book on sales, it would be
Non-Manipulative Selling by Tony Alessandra.
This is a diamond in the rough among sales books. Many other books on sales, at least in the few that I've read and others I've skimmed, seem to be full of subtle and not-so-subtle psychological manipulation that always gave me an uneasy feeling in my gut once the conversation ended. This book is different. However, even if you believe in the "hard sell" philosophy, you should read this, since at the very least, you learn many tips to prevent negotiations from getting hostile.