Informed Success: A Bibliography for Student Entrepreneurs

Enable Your Buyers for Faster B2B Sales

What drives B2B sales most effectively--focusing on what you do as a salesperson or on what your champion and the buying group does behind the scenes? The latest research makes it clear that the B2B buying process has become too complex and difficult and buyers today crave companies and experienced guides who make the process easier. Focus on making buying easier and your prospects will buy from you faster and more often. Sales teams can shorten the sales cycle by as much as 68% when they learn to equip their champion--the people promoting their solution inside the target account--using the DEEP-C(TM) buyer enablement framework: Discover, Engage, Equip, Personalize, and Coach. This book guides sales leaders and professionals through the process of moving from a sales-focused approach to a buyer enablement model that reduces buying friction and accelerates the purchase.

From the bestselling author of "Drive" and "A Whole New Mind", and teacher of the popular MasterClass on Sales and Persuasion, comes a surprising--and surprisingly useful--new book that explores the power of selling in our lives.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in nine Americans works in sales. Every day more than fifteen million people earn their keep by persuading someone else to make a purchase. But dig deeper and a startling truth emerges: Yes, one in nine Americans works in sales. But so do the other eight. Whether we're employees pitching colleagues on a new idea, entrepreneurs enticing funders to invest, or parents and teachers cajoling children to study, we spend our days trying to move others. Like it or not, we're all in sales now.

"To Sell Is Human" offers a fresh look at the art and science of selling. As he did in "Drive" and "A Whole New Mind", Daniel H. Pink draws on a rich trove of social science for his counterintuitive insights. He reveals the new ABCs of moving others (it's no longer "Always Be Closing"), explains why extraverts don't make the best salespeople, and shows how giving people an "off-ramp" for their actions can matter more than actually changing their minds.

Along the way, Pink describes the six successors to the elevator pitch, the three rules for understanding another's perspective, the five frames that can make your message clearer and more persuasive, and much more. The result is a perceptive and practical book--one that will change how you see the world and transform what you do at work, at school, and at home.

THE CLASSIC GUIDE TO HIGH-LEVEL SELLING. Updated with new insights from global executives.

How do the best salespeople become trusted advisors to top executives? How do they prepare the right message and get in front of the right influencers and decision-makers? How do they close major sales and establish loyalty for the long-term? The authors of this groundbreaking book took a novel approach to answer these questions by asking more than 500 senior decision-makers what they look for when salespeople call. What these top executives reveal will change the way you sell.

This second edition has been updated with new insights on how to stand out and succeed in a market where executives are using social media and other technologies as a key part of their buying process. You'll learn how to:
* Target the most relevant executives in any sales opportunity
* Win support from the executive's network of gatekeepers and influencers
* Position yourself as the supplier who will add the most value with least risk
* Update your prospecting and selling skills for the digital age
* Sell higher, win bigger, and close faster.

Based on the world's largest study of its kind, "Selling to the C-Suite, Second Edition" blends empirical research with practical insights to help you sell higher, faster, and stronger.

The bible for bringing cutting-edge products to larger markets--now revised and updated with new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing

In "Crossing the Chasm", Geoffrey A. Moore shows that in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle--which begins with innovators and moves to early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards--there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. While early adopters are willing to sacrifice for the advantage of being first, the early majority waits until they know that the technology actually offers improvements in productivity. The challenge for innovators and marketers is to narrow this chasm and ultimately accelerate adoption across every segment.

This third edition brings Moore's classic work up to date with dozens of new examples of successes and failures, new strategies for marketing in the digital world, and Moore's most current insights and findings. He also includes two new appendices, the first connecting the ideas in "Crossing the Chasm" to work subsequently published in his Inside the Tornado, and the second presenting his recent groundbreaking work for technology adoption models for high-tech consumer markets.

The New York Times bestseller that explains why certain products and ideas become popular.

What makes things popular? If you said advertising, think again. People don't listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?

Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger has spent the last decade answering these questions. He's studied why New York Times articles make the paper's own Most E-mailed list, why products get word of mouth, and how social influence shapes everything from the cars we buy to the clothes we wear to the names we give our children. In "Contagious", Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos. Learn how a luxury steakhouse found popularity through the lowly cheesesteak, why anti-drug commercials might have actually increased drug use, and why more than 200 million consumers shared a video about one of the most boring products there is: a blender.

"Contagious" provides specific, actionable techniques for helping information spread--for designing messages, advertisements, and content that people will share. Whether you're a manager at a big company, a small business owner trying to boost awareness, a politician running for office, or a health official trying to get the word out, "Contagious" will show you how to make your product or idea catch on.

That gap between your company's sales efforts and strategy? It's real--and a huge vulnerability. Addressing that gap, actionably and with attention to relevant research, is the focus of this book.

In "Aligning Strategy and Sales", Harvard Business School professor Frank Cespedes equips you to link your go-to-market initiatives with strategic goals. Cespedes offers a road map to articulate strategy in ways that people in the field can understand and that will fuel the behaviors required for profitable growth. Without that alignment, leaders will press for better execution when they need a better strategy, or change strategic direction with great cost and turmoil when they should focus on the basics of sales execution.

With thoughtful, clear, and engaging examples, "Aligning Strategy and Sales" provides a framework for diagnosing and managing the core levers available for effective selling in any organization. It will give you the know-how and tools to move from ideas to action and build a sales effort linked to your firm's unique goals, not a generic selling formula.

Cespedes shows how sales efforts affect all elements of value creation in a business, whether you're a start-up seeking to scale or an established firm looking to jump-start new growth. The book provides key insights to optimize your firm's customer management activities and so improve selling and strategy.

Four years ago, the bestselling authors of "The Challenger Sale" overturned decades of conventional wisdom with a bold new approach to sales. Now their latest research reveals something even more surprising: Being a Challenger seller isn't enough. Your success or failure also depends on who you challenge.

Picture your ideal customer: friendly, eager to meet, ready to coach you through the sale and champion your products and services across the organization. It turns out that's the last person you need. Most marketing and sales teams go after low-hanging fruit: buyers who are eager and have clearly articulated needs. That's simply human nature; it's much easier to build a relationship with someone who always makes time for you, engages with your content, and listens attentively. But according to brand-new CEB research--based on data from thousands of B2B marketers, sellers, and buyers around the world--the highest-performing teams focus their time on potential customers who are far more skeptical, far less interested in meeting, and ultimately agnostic as to who wins the deal. How could this be?

The authors of "The Challenger Customer" reveal that high-performing B2B teams grasp something that their average-performing peers don't: Now that big, complex deals increasingly require consensus among a wide range of players across the organization, the limiting factor is rarely the salesperson's inability to get an individual stakeholder to agree to a solution. More often it's that the stakeholders inside the company can't even agree with one another about what the problem is.

It turns out only a very specific type of customer stakeholder has the credibility, persuasive skill, and will to effectively challenge his or her colleagues to pursue anything more ambitious than the status quo. These customers get deals to the finish line far more often than friendlier stakeholders who seem so receptive at first. In other words, Challenger sellers do best when they target Challenger customers.

"The Challenger Customer" unveils research-based tools that will help you distinguish the "Talkers" from the "Mobilizers" in any organization. It also provides a blueprint for finding them, engaging them with disruptive insight, and equipping them to effectively challenge their own organization.

Learn powerful closing and sales negotiation tactics that unlock yes and seal the deal.
Each year, sales professionals leave billions of dollars on the table because they are out gunned, out maneuvered, and out played by savvy buyers, who have been schooled in the art and science of negotiation. Because today's buyers have more power than ever before--more information, more at stake, and more control over the buying process--they almost always enter sales negotiations in a much stronger position than the salespeople on the other side of the table. The results are sadly predictable: salespeople and their companies end up on the losing end of the deal. In this brutal paradigm, if you fail to master the skills, strategies, and tactics to go toe-to-toe with modern buyers and win at the sales negotiation table, your income and long-term earning potential will suffer--along with your company's growth, profits, and market valuation.

In his new book “INKED: The Ultimate Guide to Powerful Closing and Sales Negotiation Tactics that Unlock YES and Seal the Deal”, Jeb Blount levels the playing field by giving you the strategies, tactics, techniques, skills, and human-influence frameworks required to become a powerful and effective sales negotiator. In his signature, straightforward style, Jeb pulls no punches. He slaps you right in the face with the cold, hard truth and lays bare the reasons why you keep getting beaten by buyers who have been trained in how to play you. Then, he teaches you exactly what you need to know, do, and say to gain more control and more power over the outcomes of your deals, and WIN.

“INKED” is the most comprehensive Sales Negotiation resource ever developed for the sales profession. Unlike so many other negotiating books that ignore the reality sellers face in the rapid-fire, real world of the sales profession, “INKED” is a sales-specific negotiation primer. You'll learn directly from one of the most sought-after and celebrated sales trainers of our generation. Following in the footsteps of his blockbuster bestsellers Fanatical Prospecting, Sales EQ, and Objections, Jeb Blount's “INKED” puts the same strategies employed by his clients--a who's who of the world's most prestigious organizations--right into your hands.

Direct, step by step approach to getting tons of leads and growing your business using statistically valid test results. You'll learn the 5 key elements in all sales and marketing with specific examples of campaigns that generated Hundreds of Millions of Dollars of Opportunity for IBM and $3 Billion of Deposits for National City Bank. More than just how to generate leads, this book covers how to make the sale then grow your business powerfully and solidly.