What Should We Be Reading?

I was speaking to a group of sales people. During the Q&A, a salesperson asked me, “What are your favorite books on sales? What should we be reading?”

There are lots of outstanding books on selling. While the basic principles at the core of high performance selling are the same, each book has a slightly different perspective on how to implement them. But as I reflected on the question, I asked,

“What books are your customers reading? Where do your customers go to learn? Where are they going to get insights on how to more effectively grow their businesses and perform?”

I then went on, “Perhaps, if we started reading the books our customers are reading, we’d have a deeper understanding of what they do and how they might be thinking about things. Through this, perhaps we can connect with them more effectively.”

We constantly struggle to connect with our customers, to understand their challenges and problems. To understand their strategies, how they translate those strategies into execution, how they analyze and look at things.

If we looked at where they go to learn and get new ideas, and we followed them, perhaps we could connect with them in more meaningful ways.

Early in my career, I sold to bankers. I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and American Banker to start understanding what was happening in banking at the moment. Books they read, at the time, included: “The House of Morgan; Manias Panics and Crashes; Liar’s Poker; Banking Strategies Beyond 2000.” Strategy and business books they read included, “In Pursuit of Excellence, Competitive Strategy, Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors; The Practice of Management; Corporate Strategy.”

When I moved to working with manufacturing and process based organizations, I read all sorts of books on modern manufacturing.

We create the greatest value with our customers when we connect with them where they are at. When we understand the things they do, how they think, what they care about. When we engage them talking about the things they talk about with each other, using the language and terms they use.

We learn more about selling by reading sales books. We learn more about our customers by reading what they are interested in reading and reading those books that influence their thinking. Perhaps we do better with a balanced diet of different books, magazines, journals, leveraging those both to help us in doing our jobs and in connecting impactfully with our customers.