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.