How to Sell More: Tools and Techniques from Harvard Business Review

Introduction

Among the disciplines that make up the field of management, sales rarely gets the respect it deserves. If a business does a perfect job of designing its products and services, the theory goes, who needs salespeople? As Peter Drucker wrote: “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous . . . to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

In fact, as the essays in this collection make clear, selling remains a vital function in the vast majority of companies. Technology has made many products more complicated, creating the need for salespeople to educate consumers on their uses. In the B2B world, the shift to services has created a move away from simple transactional relationships ...