Sales leaders in startups have to wear many hats - they are often expected to personally drive revenue as well as scale processes, build teams, hit targets, and impress investors. That is a lot for anyone and requires these leaders to be a jack of all trades in terms of their sales and leadership skills. 

While classics like How to Win Friends and Influence People and The Challenger Sales are always good books to help level-up skills, chances are you’ve read or heard these techniques a million times before. 

To help sales leaders stay on top of new trends and continue to up their skills, we have listed out the top 5 summer reads (all published in 2019 or 2020) to help encourage growth in every facet of a startup sales career: 

Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups

According to serial entrepreneur and author Amos Schwartzfarb, most startups fail because they can’t grow revenue quickly enough. Sell More Faster was written as a practical playbook to help any startup identify, build, and scale their organizations and start growing their customer base from day one. It was written to help readers find product-market fit, test sales models, scale sales teams, and develop growth strategies to expand a business exponentially.  

Find it on Amazon 

Better Selling Through Storytelling: The Essential Roadmap to Becoming a Revenue Rockstar

We are all familiar with the old stereotype of pushy salesmen using high-pressure tactics and canned speeches, cue Glengarry Glen Ross, but sales has changed. The new way of selling is to draw people in with a compelling story. John Livesay encourages readers to become better storytellers by giving up traditional ‘selling’ and becoming a storyteller instead. He teaches sales reps how to not take rejection personally, overcome fears and embrace new tools to help get the sale.

Find it on Amazon

Enablement Mastery: Grow Your Business Faster by Aligning Your People, Processes, and Priorities

We all know startups are fast-paced fluid environments. With competing priorities, ever-changing targets, and continual testing things will inevitably get messy without proper alignment. Geared toward sales enablement professionals and leadership teams, this book provides effective methods for aligning people, processes, and priorities. It contains an Enablement Process Map to align go-to-market teams and strategies to create a culture of learning.

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B2B Is Really P2P: How to Win With High Touch in a High Tech World

If closing more sales is your goal then this is your book! Written as a step-by-step manual for anyone who wants to create better rapport, stronger sales outputs, and cement long-term customer relationships. This book breaks down components of the ‘sales gene’ (leveraging the same theory of persuasion as Tony Robbins) and teaches you how to build rapport, trust, likeability and long-term relationships that lead to stronger sales results. 

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It Takes What It Takes 

While not a ‘traditional sales book’, this book is essential for salespeople who face negativity and rejection on a daily basis. Written by Trevor Moawad, a top mental conditioning coach for elite athletes and special forces, it provides strategies and tools to manage and overcome negativity and develop the mental toughness to achieve goals. The book attempts to rewire negativity with "neutral thinking,'' a non-judgemental, nonreactive way of calmly assessing and analyzing problems in the critical moments before taking action. 

Find it on Amazon

Is there a newly released sales book that you loved and it didn’t make our list? Let us know what you’ve been reading!