Crush Your Sales Goals in 2024, Presented by Pipedrive

Are you a salesperson? You might be surprised to learn that the answer is “Yes.” Hate it or love it, in the modern world, we’re all selling something, and the value of sales skills has never been higher.

To Sell Is Human explains the history, evolution, and significance of sales. It challenges commonly held assumptions by redefining the meaning of sales, re-evaluating the purpose of the salesperson, and showing you how to effectively harness sales skills to create purpose, growth, or “movement” in your life (whether it be for personal or professional gain). Using our guide, you’ll build on your inherent sales instincts to develop confidence, build connection, and generate success in your life.

People who succeed in sales have high incomes and job security. However, while many people enter the profession, only a few succeed. In fact, of every 100 salespeople, just four of them will earn as much as all the rest combined. In The Psychology of Selling, bestselling author and management consultant Brian Tracy explains how you can become one of those top salespeople by understanding how your customers think. He walks you through basic and advanced selling techniques, demonstrating how you can dramatically increase your sales success by improving your skills just a little bit on a consistent basis.

The Little Red Book of Selling is a pocket guide to sales success featuring 13 principles of selling, along with numerous practical tips and techniques. The principles incorporate sales trainer Jeffrey Gitomer’s philosophy of sales: Sell yourself, give value before selling anything, and make the customer want to buy. Gitomer, the author of several best-selling books on sales, argues that while salespeople are always looking for the secret to sales success, you are either the secret or obstacle to your ability to make sales. The more you practice the principles in this book, the more hurdles you’ll eliminate and the more sales you’ll win.

Have you ever wondered why so many high-tech products seem to make a sensational entrance, but then disappear before they’re refined enough to become practical? Marketing consultant Geoffrey Moore has an explanation: They fall into a “chasm” that separates the early market from the mainstream market.

In this guide, we’ll explore the chasm phenomenon, analyzing Moore’s model and comparing it to others that examine the way innovations are adopted. Then, we’ll look at Moore’s strategy for piloting a product across this chasm to mainstream success by targeting a niche market, forming corporate alliances to ensure the customer gets a complete solution, positioning your product as the market leader in that niche, and setting up an effective distribution channel.

The purpose of a business is to make money and grow—and for a small business, the surest way to make money is to have a simple, clear marketing plan defining who you’re targeting as prospects and customers and how you’ll reach them. However, many small businesses fail to market effectively.

In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, business coach and entrepreneur Allan Dib tells small business owners how to create a marketing plan using a simple template that guides you through three customer-focused phases of marketing: awareness, familiarity, and enthusiasm. The plan defines a process or “customer journey” of interactions that you’ll walk your prospects through. They’ll start out not knowing anything about your business and ultimately become superfans who will drive your business growth. This guide explores Dib’s method and compares it to other templates and marketing strategies.

Tired of competing head-to-head with other companies? Do you feel like your strategy differs little from the competition surrounding you? W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne suggest that the answer to competitive problems is to create a blue ocean: a brand-new market for an innovative idea, allowing your company to avoid competing with rivals—because it has no direct rivals.

In Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim and Mauborgne discuss how you can create such a market by focusing on your product’s characteristics that customers really care about while discarding the characteristics they don’t. This creates a new product offering that doesn’t currently exist, in a space without direct competitors.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to develop a blue ocean strategy, how to execute it, and how to anticipate potential problems. We’ll also look at how a blue ocean strategy aligns with other business strategy frameworks, and where it differs.

The internet is full of online businesses, but what separates the million-dollar startups from the unprofitable failures? As author and entrepreneur Russell Brunson explains in Dotcom Secrets, the answer is sales funnels: website layouts that create sales by guiding customers through a preset experience. This experience persuades them of your product’s value every step of the way.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to design a website for your business that generates the most sales possible. We’ll detail the specific steps required to attract visitors to your website, and we’ll describe the three fundamental elements for making any marketing message compelling enough to inspire action. In our commentary, we’ll help you put Brunson’s ideas into action by offering complementary ideas from marketing books like Permission Marketing and Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, as well as books for startup entrepreneurs like The Lean Startup and The Mom Test.

The internet is full of online businesses, but what separates the million-dollar startups from the unprofitable failures? As author and entrepreneur Russell Brunson explains in Dotcom Secrets, the answer is sales funnels: website layouts that create sales by guiding customers through a preset experience. This experience persuades them of your product’s value every step of the way.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to design a website for your business that generates the most sales possible. We’ll detail the specific steps required to attract visitors to your website, and we’ll describe the three fundamental elements for making any marketing message compelling enough to inspire action. In our commentary, we’ll help you put Brunson’s ideas into action by offering complementary ideas from marketing books like Permission Marketing and Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, as well as books for startup entrepreneurs like The Lean Startup and The Mom Test.

In The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes argues that the secret to sales success is relentless discipline, determination, and above all, repetition of just a few steps. For Holmes, sales mastery is intensive, not extensive—it’s about being an expert in a relative handful of practices, not being adequate or average at many things.

But you and your entire team have to be fully committed to refining and perfecting every aspect of your new sales strategy. By implementing effective time management across your company, honing your sales team with interactive training, hiring people with the right personality traits, and relentless marketing that presents your company’s value to the customer, you can significantly boost your sales figures and put your team on the path to permanent success.

This guide takes you through Holmes’s key ideas about building a first-rate sales operation and supplements them with more up-to-date information and commentary (the book was published in 2008)—while also offering counterpoints to some of his more outdated or controversial suggestions.

The internet is full of online businesses, but what separates the million-dollar startups from the unprofitable failures? As author and entrepreneur Russell Brunson explains in Dotcom Secrets, the answer is sales funnels: website layouts that create sales by guiding customers through a preset experience. This experience persuades them of your product’s value every step of the way.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to design a website for your business that generates the most sales possible. We’ll detail the specific steps required to attract visitors to your website, and we’ll describe the three fundamental elements for making any marketing message compelling enough to inspire action. In our commentary, we’ll help you put Brunson’s ideas into action by offering complementary ideas from marketing books like Permission Marketing and Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, as well as books for startup entrepreneurs like The Lean Startup and The Mom Test.

Have you ever wondered how platform businesses like Spotify and Amazon became so successful? In Platform Revolution, a team of economists and businesspeople—Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul Choudary—offer some insight: Platform businesses harness their unique characteristics to drive competitiveness and transformation, resulting in profound economic, societal, and political impacts. Parker, Van Alstyne, and Choudary also highlight the distinct skill set required to operate such a business and provide practical tips for aspiring platform entrepreneurs.

In our guide, we’ll compare the platform business model to the traditional business model known as a pipeline, explain why platforms are becoming dominant, and explore their wide-ranging effects. We’ll also outline essential design and management strategies for platform developers. Our commentary will provide additional insights on economic concepts, discuss tips from business experts, and explore real-world applications of Platform Revolution principles.

In The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes argues that the secret to sales success is relentless discipline, determination, and above all, repetition of just a few steps. For Holmes, sales mastery is intensive, not extensive—it’s about being an expert in a relative handful of practices, not being adequate or average at many things.

But you and your entire team have to be fully committed to refining and perfecting every aspect of your new sales strategy. By implementing effective time management across your company, honing your sales team with interactive training, hiring people with the right personality traits, and relentless marketing that presents your company’s value to the customer, you can significantly boost your sales figures and put your team on the path to permanent success.

This guide takes you through Holmes’s key ideas about building a first-rate sales operation and supplements them with more up-to-date information and commentary (the book was published in 2008)—while also offering counterpoints to some of his more outdated or controversial suggestions.

In today’s fast-paced, high-tech world, old approaches to marketing no longer work. Large scale, big budget advertising campaigns are too slow and imprecise for the online world. Better by far is to use growth hacking, the authors’ cutting-edge strategy for optimizing your business and skyrocketing its growth.

Hacking Growth presents Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown’s non-traditional approach to refining your marketing, product design, user experience, and more. Ellis and Brown were two of the first Silicon Valley pioneers to devise growth hacking strategies, and their methods have been used by top tech companies as well as startups to create massive growth.

In this guide, we’ll cover the basics of growth hacking—how to set up your team, gather data, generate insights, create ideas, and optimize your business for growth. We’ll also provide supplementary resources, note possible ethical concerns with data gathering, and suggest alternative strategies to the authors’ specific templates.

In Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, marketing expert Gary Vaynerchuk calls on the sport of boxing to illustrate how to create striking social media content. “Jabs” are interactions that build relationships with your customers and should be thrown far more often than “right hooks,” which are calls to action.

Vaynerchuk explains how to tailor your jabs and hooks for five major platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr), how social media marketing is different than any type of marketing that’s come before it, and how small businesses can successfully compete with large ones in the social media arena.

According to author and entrepreneur Keith Ferrazzi, developing fulfilling and mutually beneficial professional relationships, or successfully networking is crucial to career success. Becoming a prolific networker will give you a reputation for having good people skills, making it easier for you to gain positions managing others. Likewise, if you already know and get on well with company leaders, they may choose to do business with you rather than people they don’t know.

In Never Eat Alone, Ferrazzi gives tips on building and maintaining a professional network. Learn how to network with people who can help you achieve your goals; how to use conferences to network; and how to use social media to get new contacts to come to you.

Have you ever wondered how platform businesses like Spotify and Amazon became so successful? In Platform Revolution, a team of economists and businesspeople—Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul Choudary—offer some insight: Platform businesses harness their unique characteristics to drive competitiveness and transformation, resulting in profound economic, societal, and political impacts. Parker, Van Alstyne, and Choudary also highlight the distinct skill set required to operate such a business and provide practical tips for aspiring platform entrepreneurs.

In our guide, we’ll compare the platform business model to the traditional business model known as a pipeline, explain why platforms are becoming dominant, and explore their wide-ranging effects. We’ll also outline essential design and management strategies for platform developers. Our commentary will provide additional insights on economic concepts, discuss tips from business experts, and explore real-world applications of Platform Revolution principles.

In the digital age, when nearly anyone can start a business online, how do you stand out? In Launch, marketing expert Jeff Walker offers a product launch strategy that will help you market and sell a product with little to no start-up costs. By focusing on giving value and building customer engagement, you can create a business that grants you flexibility, autonomy, and immediate profits.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how the Internet has changed the marketing game and how you can adapt to—and take advantage of—this new landscape to quickly and successfully grow your business. Then, we’ll discover how you can attract interested buyers with little more than an email list, even before you have a product to sell. Along the way, we’ll draw on insights from the field of psychology to show why Walker’s strategy works and compare his book with those of other experts, such as Seth Godin’s All Marketers are Liars and Ryan Holiday’s Perennial Seller.

Do you dream of owning your own business but aren’t sure how to get funding to start it? In The Minimalist Entrepreneur, Sahil Lavingia says you don’t need any. In this book, the successful business owner gives detailed advice for starting your own profitable “minimalist” business without using venture capital or spending a penny on advertising.

In this guide, we’ll explain Lavingia’s business model, from identifying a business you’ll love to run by finding inspiration in your own communities, to setting up, testing, marketing, and launching your business. We’ll also discuss how to run your business sustainably, with the ultimate goal of achieving “time affluence” for yourself, and making a positive contribution to the world.

Throughout, we’ll compare and supplement Lavinagia’s advice on starting a business with that from other books like The Lean Startup, The $100 Startup, and Blue Ocean Strategy.

Many people feel their dream of being a professional writer is too abstract to become reality. However, Nicolas Cole argues otherwise and uses his own story as testament—he went from a nobody blogger to a successful career writer in only a few years. According to Cole, anyone can create a successful online writing career—be it in blogging, copywriting, poetry, or any other digitally published format—as long as they do two things: write consistently and understand the world of online writing. In The Art and Business of Online Writing, Cole lays out his guide to establishing an online writing career based on his experience and success.

In this guide, we’ve organized Cole’s tips and tricks into a three-part guide for becoming a successful online writer. We’ll discuss the technicalities of writing successfully, gaining an audience, and eventually profiting from your content. In our commentary, we’ll expand on Cole’s advice using expert sources like On Writing by Stephen King and Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk.

According to author and entrepreneur Keith Ferrazzi, developing fulfilling and mutually beneficial professional relationships, or successfully networking is crucial to career success. Becoming a prolific networker will give you a reputation for having good people skills, making it easier for you to gain positions managing others. Likewise, if you already know and get on well with company leaders, they may choose to do business with you rather than people they don’t know.

In Never Eat Alone, Ferrazzi gives tips on building and maintaining a professional network. Learn how to network with people who can help you achieve your goals; how to use conferences to network; and how to use social media to get new contacts to come to you.

The purpose of a business is to make money and grow—and for a small business, the surest way to make money is to have a simple, clear marketing plan defining who you’re targeting as prospects and customers and how you’ll reach them. However, many small businesses fail to market effectively.

In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, business coach and entrepreneur Allan Dib tells small business owners how to create a marketing plan using a simple template that guides you through three customer-focused phases of marketing: awareness, familiarity, and enthusiasm. The plan defines a process or “customer journey” of interactions that you’ll walk your prospects through. They’ll start out not knowing anything about your business and ultimately become superfans who will drive your business growth. This guide explores Dib’s method and compares it to other templates and marketing strategies.

The purpose of a business is to make money and grow—and for a small business, the surest way to make money is to have a simple, clear marketing plan defining who you’re targeting as prospects and customers and how you’ll reach them. However, many small businesses fail to market effectively.

In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, business coach and entrepreneur Allan Dib tells small business owners how to create a marketing plan using a simple template that guides you through three customer-focused phases of marketing: awareness, familiarity, and enthusiasm. The plan defines a process or “customer journey” of interactions that you’ll walk your prospects through. They’ll start out not knowing anything about your business and ultimately become superfans who will drive your business growth. This guide explores Dib’s method and compares it to other templates and marketing strategies.

The internet is full of online businesses, but what separates the million-dollar startups from the unprofitable failures? As author and entrepreneur Russell Brunson explains in Dotcom Secrets, the answer is sales funnels: website layouts that create sales by guiding customers through a preset experience. This experience persuades them of your product’s value every step of the way.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to design a website for your business that generates the most sales possible. We’ll detail the specific steps required to attract visitors to your website, and we’ll describe the three fundamental elements for making any marketing message compelling enough to inspire action. In our commentary, we’ll help you put Brunson’s ideas into action by offering complementary ideas from marketing books like Permission Marketing and Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, as well as books for startup entrepreneurs like The Lean Startup and The Mom Test.

In the digital age, when nearly anyone can start a business online, how do you stand out? In Launch, marketing expert Jeff Walker offers a product launch strategy that will help you market and sell a product with little to no start-up costs. By focusing on giving value and building customer engagement, you can create a business that grants you flexibility, autonomy, and immediate profits.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how the Internet has changed the marketing game and how you can adapt to—and take advantage of—this new landscape to quickly and successfully grow your business. Then, we’ll discover how you can attract interested buyers with little more than an email list, even before you have a product to sell. Along the way, we’ll draw on insights from the field of psychology to show why Walker’s strategy works and compare his book with those of other experts, such as Seth Godin’s All Marketers are Liars and Ryan Holiday’s Perennial Seller.

Are you a salesperson? You might be surprised to learn that the answer is “Yes.” Hate it or love it, in the modern world, we’re all selling something, and the value of sales skills has never been higher.

To Sell Is Human explains the history, evolution, and significance of sales. It challenges commonly held assumptions by redefining the meaning of sales, re-evaluating the purpose of the salesperson, and showing you how to effectively harness sales skills to create purpose, growth, or “movement” in your life (whether it be for personal or professional gain). Using our guide, you’ll build on your inherent sales instincts to develop confidence, build connection, and generate success in your life.

People who succeed in sales have high incomes and job security. However, while many people enter the profession, only a few succeed. In fact, of every 100 salespeople, just four of them will earn as much as all the rest combined. In The Psychology of Selling, bestselling author and management consultant Brian Tracy explains how you can become one of those top salespeople by understanding how your customers think. He walks you through basic and advanced selling techniques, demonstrating how you can dramatically increase your sales success by improving your skills just a little bit on a consistent basis.

The ultimate goal of copywriting is to craft advertisements that spur demand for what you’re selling. You do this by understanding what customers already need and framing your product as the only solution to fulfill these needs.

In the best-selling classic Breakthrough Advertising, renowned copywriter Eugene M. Schwartz offers timeless advice for crafting persuasive advertisements that convince customers to buy your products.

This guide walks you through Schwartz’s methods for writing advertisements that sell. You’ll come away knowing:

• Exactly what you need to understand about customers to craft successful advertisements
• Specific techniques you can use to create captivating headlines
• Persuasive methods you can apply to write compelling copy

Additionally, we’ll clarify Schwartz’s ideas with research from marketing professionals and suggest actionable strategies to help you integrate these concepts into your copywriting process.