The sales books my manager told me to read — I honestly reviewed them all

Last winter, it was another day I'd failed to hit my cold-call target. After work, I was sitting blankly in a café near Piccadilly Gardens with an americano in front of me when my manager Dave sent me a message on Slack. "Read this book. It'll change your life." There was a link attached. That was the beginning. Over the next eight months or so, I read six books Dave recommended alone, and if you add the ones senior colleagues slipped me saying "this one's the real deal," the total comes to about eight. Some of them genuinely changed the way I close deals, and some of them — honestly — I wouldn't have felt bad dropping into a charity shop donation box.

Today I'm going through that list. I'm not giving star ratings. Instead, I'll talk about whether I actually used each one at work and what changed after I read it.

The ones that genuinely helped

SPIN Selling — This was the first book Dave recommended. The title alone felt a bit old-school, so I didn't have high expectations, but after reading it, the way I handled client meetings changed completely. The core idea is simple: change the order of your questions. Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-Payoff — once I had that four-step framework in my head, I started drafting a list of questions before picking up the phone. Within a month of using this, my meeting conversion rate went up noticeably. Easily the most practical book I've read.

The Challenger Sale — This one was left on my desk by a senior colleague, Priya, during lunch. The core framework is "teach, tailor, and take control," and while reading it, I realised how much energy I'd been spending just trying to keep clients happy. Not everything in the book landed, though. It's geared towards B2B enterprise sales, so there's a gap between that and the small-to-mid-sized deals I work on. Still, the attitude of "offer the client an insight they don't already have" is something I consciously apply even now when preparing presentations.

Never Split the Difference — Strictly speaking, this isn't a sales book but a negotiation book. It's written by a former FBI hostage negotiator, and the "mirroring" technique I picked up from it is something I put to use straight away. Just by repeating the last three words of what the client says, they'll voluntarily offer up more information. I once demonstrated this to a mate at a pub in Manchester city centre, and he laughed and said, "Why do you keep repeating what I say?" — but in a work setting, it's remarkably effective.

The ones I read but weren't great

From here on, I'm going to be honest, even if it stings a bit.

One book — I'll deliberately leave out the title — spent all 300 pages repeating things like "have passion," "wake up early," and "visualise your goals." I remember muttering to myself after finishing a chapter, "So how exactly am I supposed to call a client?" It was a self-help book dressed up as a sales book.

Another one was about "social selling," and it devoted a full two chapters to advice on getting a professional LinkedIn profile photo taken. As if a 19-year-old could afford to spend over £200 on a profile picture. I was clearly not the target audience.

Then there was a book that managers call a "classic," but it was written in the '90s and every case study was based on fax-based selling. The principles themselves weren't bad, but with every chapter I had to mentally translate: "If I swap this out for email or a video call…" That's not the reader's job — it's something the author should handle in a revised edition.

How you read matters too

One thing I realised: the absorption rate was completely different between reading these books in snatches on the tram during my commute and reading them at a café on the weekend while jotting down key points in a notebook. One of the reasons SPIN Selling worked so well for me was timing — I read it and then applied it straight to my Monday call list. Motivational books, on the other hand, left me with nothing by Monday morning no matter how carefully I read them.

I am grateful to Dave. Without that Slack message, I'd probably still be just watching sales summary videos on YouTube. But out of eight books, only three actually left a mark on my performance. As a ratio, that's not great, but the value of those three more than makes up for the disappointment of the other five. Next time someone tells me "read this book, it'll change your life" — I'll say thanks first, and then check the table of contents before anything else.