Feb 14, 2020
4 min read
Sales 101
thelighthouse guide to Sales + Growth
Keep reading for lighthouse-approved Sales & Growth resources, newsletters, podcasts, and more.
Many thanks to lighthouse member Skylar Elisberg for curating this Playbook! See his answers below ⬇
Get the Skills
- If you’re a higher level sales professional, join the Revenue Collective community. Get in-person and online support to help you network within the field, learn best practices, and receive industry insights.
- Most roles will include on-the-job sales training. If you’re earlier in your career and looking to learn the basic before the first day, check out this Introduction to Sales or the sales courses on Coursera.
- Looking to level up in your Sales career? Read this blog post from Salesforce on Sales Certifications to take you to the next level.
Newsletters
- Follow this industry leader: Sam Jacobs.
- Jeffrey Gitomer, aka the “King of Sales”, is a great resource to take advantage of.
- Looking for success strategies for management? Check out Selling Power.
- Author John Barrows has experience in sales at every level. He sends out sales tips weekly.
- Morning Brew sends daily newsletters to make it easy for you to stay on top of industries and news.
Helpful Podcasts
- How I Built This with Guy Raz is great for inspiration. It dives into the stories behind some of the world’s best known companies. It weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists — and the movements they built.
- If you’re looking to learn tactical strategies, check out the Sales Hacker podcast. It covers various topics, all touched upon by top personalities in the industry.
Books
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies.
- Nike founder Phil Knight’s memoir, Shoe Dog, illuminates his company’s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world’s most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.
- In Principles by Ray Dalio, he shares the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business — and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals.
- The Challenger Sale is a must-read for any professional looking to master the art of a sale in today’s world.
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini explains the psychology of why people say yes — and how to apply these understandings.
- How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carniege will teach you six ways to make people like you, twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking, nine ways to change people without arousing resentment and much more!
- Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss’s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles―counterintuitive tactics and strategies―you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life.
- Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine with $100M Best Practices of Salesforce.com by Aaron Ross. Discover the outbound sales process that, in just a few years, helped add $100 million in recurring revenue to Salesforce.com, almost doubling their enterprise growth… with zero cold calls.
- From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross makes very clear how to get to hyper-growth and the work needed to actually get there.
- Sales Management. Simplified: The Straight Truth About Getting Exceptional Result from Your Sales Team by Mike Weinberg can teach you to implement a simple framework for sales leadership, foster a healthy, high-performance sales culture, conduct productive meetings, put the right people in the right roles, retain top producers and remediate underperformers, point salespeople at the proper targets, and much more.
Sales Opportunities
- Salesjobs.com focuses strictly on sales, where both job seekers and employers can look for the perfect match.
- The Ladders is a paid membership, but could be worth it in order to find your ideal sales role.
- Standard job boards including LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed are also great options.
Insider Advice
Skylar says:
Have a team around you that pushes you and makes you better.
Repetition is key. Sales mastery comes through guided repetition.
Never underestimate networking for sales roles. Ask people you find inspiring for introductions to those whom make them feel similarly.
Companies ALWAYS need good salespeople. My suggestion is to first focus on what you want to sell, as that will be a primary driver of long-term success. Once you have targets identified, reach out via LinkedIn to their team leads with a personal note.
Join the club
Apply to join thelighthouse membership to tap into a network of sales professionals who are here to help you start your sales journey.
