THE ALCHEMY OF SALES

A debut guide offers an overview of sales practices.

Felton’s book is aimed at the more than five million people in the United States who work in private industry sales in fields such as manufacturing, food service, finance, and wholesale trade. A great many of these employees have had no plan to enter sales, no training, and no mentors—a fraught situation that the author recognizes from firsthand experience: “I know what it feels like to be tossed into the open ocean and told to swim to shore without any idea where the shore is or how far away it might be.” In these pages, he distills all the tips and practical advice he’s learned along the way, about everything from acquiring leads and making cold calls to developing strong relationships with all levels of a company. Each chapter is broken into many sections, followed by “key insight” insets. These tidbits range from the practical (the methods and value of research) to the theoretical, as when he addresses the adage that the customer is always right. Customers should have a major voice in what they want, he writes, but they should also acknowledge a salesperson’s expertise, or the relationship is unlikely to work. Felton writes about all this with an appealing directness. He covers a wide variety of the useful basics that other sales manuals might gloss over in pursuit of deeper or more wide-ranging stratagems. “Common courtesy goes a long way to building credibility,” he reminds his readers. The most appealing theme running through a great deal of this advice is one of service rather than opportunism: “The more you learn about your customer and their business, the greater the chance you can continue to help them get better at what they do.”

An accessible, refreshingly humane explanation of the mysteries of sales and marketing.