For the previous entry, I had to dig around in some dusty areas of my sales library. The oldest sales book was part of a series of twenty volumes called “Modern Business” dating from 1958. I bought them for $5 from our next door neighbor’s garage sale. His wife had made him toss them out, and my wife was mad at me for buying them (they require three feet of shelf space). Although I consider 1958 as almost yesterday, these books are nearly fifty years old. Most of the people I work with in SalesWays were not yet born then.

In 1958, I was living in the UK. Buddy Holly had recorded “That’ll Be The Day” in 1957. The Beatles were listening and they would do their own great thing five years later. I was not thinking at all about sales. But somebody was, because the volume called “Salesmanship” has a lot of good stuff in it. When I wrote Sales Automation Done Right, I had not read these books—they had been gathering dust, waiting for my wife’s next garage sale. There are some gems here, and now, there is no way that I will ever let them go.

Here are just a few of the ideas that will be just as appropriate in 2008, sixty years on from when they were written:

1958: “When one accepts the idea that selling is a process, he has started on the right path.”
1958: “While selling seems to be primarily an art, it still has certain aspects of a science. . . as a science, it requires the mastery of certain fundamentals which have evolved from success by others.”
1958: “In selling your product, a prospect needs conviction if you would close him.”
1958: “Analyzing a sales opportunity. If a sales opportunity arises, it is important that you carefully study it before reaching a conclusion as to whether you should make an effort to take an advantage of it.”
1958: “Value of planning. In the process of selling, planning plays a major role . . .”

Of course, the most influential factor in the progress of sales is not mentioned in “Salesmanship.” It would be another 35 years before personal computers would develop as the technology tool of choice for salespeople everywhere.

I have bought four books on sales…in the past week. They are all quite new and very different. If I have a glance around my bookshelves, I have anywhere between fifty and a hundred books devoted to sales, salespeople and sales management.

The reason I am reviewing them now is that I am writing my second book, which is devoted to sales methodology (my first book mixed in a bit of technology). It’s good to see what has already been done before you embark on a project you feel has something new to say about a subject. When I review books on the sales process, it strikes me that the human interplay between customer and salesperson must be complex; if that wasn’t the case, how could so much be written about it?

The first thing that comes to mind is that almost all of these books targeting salespeople are tactical. I use the word tactical to describe the actions of the salesperson as they are in front of the customer, whether it is what questions to ask, what to listen for, what information to retrieve, and the like. The emphasis is on the interaction with the customer as it happens in these few minutes or hours, on this day in time. The results of the tactic will hopefully contribute to the overall strategy in place to win that particular sale.

I don’t have any problem with learning the tactics of winning, but I do feel that most salespeople are faced with consuming these ideas before they know the intrinsic dynamic of the sale cycle itself. A thorough understanding of the progression of the sales cycle as it reacts to ebb and flow of the customer’s natural buying process makes tactical selling much easier.

I took a random sample of six sales books from the shelf and looked to see how many of them had “Sales Cycle” in the index. Guess what? One out of six.