Jeffrey Gitomer's little red book of selling

What Hacker News says

1. njlAug 2009
   My partner and I built a product, and we're currently selling to higher ed. He's been selling to higher ed for seven or eight years now, and I've been peripherally involved in selling to higher ed for four or five. I'd love a chance to chat about it, and my email is in my profile.

   Without knowing more details, your price feels reasonable. You need to put together a solid, total package, and don't forget 18%/year in maintenance. If your clients are getting funding from an outside source on this, you need to grease the skids. There are people who do nothing but set up and administer grants. If you can hook up with one of them, you're golden.

   The best way to learn to sell is to do it. Try to find yourself a mentor you can talk to about it, and just go for it. If you can learn how to effectively cold call, you can rule the world.

   There are lots of crappy sales books, but there are many good ones. I like SPIN Selling by Rackham; it's researched, reasonable, and most other solution selling books that came out afterward just repackage Rackham's results. I like Jeffrey Gitomer's Little Red Book of Selling. It's mostly about maintaining a positive attitude while people are telling you no. This is necessary, because selling is a goddamn emotional roller coaster. Watch out for books aimed at the hard sell. You can't hard sell a university.

   Good luck!

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2. mogstonAug 2009
   We're about to launch our first freemium based web app and will primarily be advertising the service via traditional online channels (organic search, adwords, banners etc) in order to generate online sales. Our application is aimed at marketing agencies, project teams and social media power users and can be used online, or the source code downloaded to work within corporate firewalls.

   Although sufficiently experienced at marketing online, we don't really have any experience selling offline (face to face, conferences, cold-calls, events etc). Being based in London, it seems sensible to try and obtain sales offline as a lot of our UK target market will be based here, particularly at events and conferences.

   We already have two other relatively successful websites, but have relied on our ad networks (not Google) to provide the sales expertise - our new project does not display banner ads, so this is not an option.

   As with any startup, time is very very precious, so i'm looking to source a couple of powerful, practical sales books that don't take months to read or require weeks to learn a completely new vocabulary.

   I've been searching around HN for recommendations, and have so far picked our the following books that have been suggested (i've already read The Secrets of Selling by Geoff King)

   * Jeffrey Gitomer's Little Red Book of Selling * How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling - by Frank Bettger * Bag the Elephant - by Steve Kaplan

   Are there any other books that you would recommend for a small startup in our situation? Any help you can offer would be appreciated.

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