Book Review: Sales Manager Survival Guide—Lessons from Sales’ Front Lines

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

Sales Manager Survival Guide: Lessons from Sales’ Front Lines

by David Brock

Copyright 2016 David Brock

Price $14.95 Kindle edition

Sales Manager Survival Guide is a perfect book for a new sales manager. It is also important for those of us who have been in sales for many years, because it contains everything you need to become a great sales manager. Truth be known, it is the most comprehensive book on sales management I have ever read. This book is not filled with tips, but rather actual guidelines on how to do things. It is more of an instructional book than a guidebook. If you answer “yes” to any of the following questions, this book is for you:

• Do you want to know how to find and hire the perfect sales person?
• Do you want to work on performance improvement with someone on your team who is not performing up to snuff?
• Do you want to set fair and equitable compensation packages?
• Do you want to know how to coach your team? 

How about firing someone? Or managing your manager? Or gaining listening skills? Or doing a successful ride along with your sales person? Or how to successfully deliver effective performance reviews? Or developing sales tactics? Or measuring your sales team’s performance? Or planning your future in sales management? This book shows you how to do all of these things and more. It is all here in this interesting, provocative and easy to understand book.

I especially like the author’s approach to the hard subjects like talking to your sales people about increasing their sales efficiency and helping them with their time management.

This guy truly gets it, and he is very good at helping us to get it, such as when he points out that a good CRM tool is designed to help a salesperson become more effective and efficient in her work, not simply to let a manager know what she is doing.

As I consultant whose job is to help sales managers become great sales managers, this is the most important tool I have come across in a long time. I have recommended this book to all of my clients and will continue to do so in the future. If you are a salesperson and are serious about your career path, I forbid you to go another day without reading this book.