Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
2people
2019–2025years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Believe it or not, for "selling software":
Selling Microsoft - https://www.amazon.com/Selling-Microsoft-Secrets-Successful-...
The fundamentals of software sales haven't changed much since this. While B2C SaaS is different, the B2B platform world is still much as described in this book, and more importantly, the buyers are still the people who were buying when this book was published.
While selling today should have changed, many of the enterprise procurement processes that were being set up as this was published are still the same. That makes this an excellent foundation for understanding how to change it up.
That said, you said building an agency ... so do you mean selling software, or selling the ability to deliver solutions that a company can't get off the shelf?
That's quite different.
- Selling Microsoft: https://www.amazon.com/Selling-Microsoft-Secrets-Successful-...
Quoting an Amazon reviewer:
> As opposed to most "hot new" sales approaches which focus on changing your personal style, this book does a great job of providing a strategic step-by-step plan from A-Z. It's void of fluff and gets right to the point of outlining the nuts and bolts of the process including pre-sales planning, performance tracking, maintaining growth, and time management. It's worth reading in general and especially for those migrating into tech sales.
- I've made a habit of regularly ordering in out-of-print business books when I see them recommended by people whose writing I have found useful. Some highlights have been 'The Rickover Effect', which details the construction of the first nuclear power plants, and 'Selling Microsoft', which discusses the day-to-day life and structure of enterprise technology salespeople in the 90s.
By far the best has been 'Managing the Design Factory' by Donald Reinertsen, which I strongly recommend to software engineering managers. I really appreciated the exploration of how organising teams and tasks impacts development speed, cost, performance and unit cost in different ways. Even though it was written in the 90s, I don't think I've seen as good a discussion on how architectural decisions impact corporate strategy.
