Ask HN: How to learn sales?
You need to separate sales from marketing. Sales is a conversation, marketing is a broadcast. Marketing gets the phone to ring, sales takes the call and closes the deal.<p>For B2B sales resembles project management: the goal is not to convince everyone to buy your product or service but to diagnose their needs and only engage with firms that will benefit.<p>For larger deals you "sell with your ears" as much as you talk.<p>I find Neil Rackham's "Spin Selling" very useful. Peter Cohan's "Great Demo" embeds a lot of discovery advice and suggests that a good demo is really a conversation driven by mutual curiosity about customer needs and software capabilities.<p>For B2B customer development interviews (those early market discovery conversations) I have a short book you may find helpful. See <a href="https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2020/01/30/40-tips-for-b2b-customer-development-interviews/" rel="nofollow">https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2020/01/30/40-tips-for-b2b-cus...</a> (there is also a link at the bottom for a PDF version).<p>Two final books I would suggest, while not exactly sales books, are "The Innovator's DNA" by Clayton Christensen and "The Right It (Pretotype It)" by Alberto Savoia. They cover a number of techniques for finding the right problem to solve and determining if your solution is a good fit for customer needs. I mention them because it's not uncommon for a startup to have a product problem that manifests as a sales problem.