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.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.For larger deals you "sell with your ears" as much as you talk.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.For B2B customer development interviews (those early market discovery conversations) I have a short book you may find helpful. See https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2020/01/30/40-tips-for-b2b-cus... (there is also a link at the bottom for a PDF version).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.