Customer Reviews

Discover Your Sales Strengths: How the World's Greatest Salespeople Develop Winning Careers

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Bar none, this is the best book you will ever read about the art of selling. Moreover, this book will change the way you think about hiring, training, managing and motivating anyone who is responsible for bringing new customers to your organization and keeping those customers engaged.

See of you can answer this question from the book correctly:
What do the top sales and marketing professionals have in common?
a. Experience and background
b. Education and training
c. Great presentation skills
d. Aggressive closers
e. None of the above

If you guessed "e", you are correct. According Gallup's extensive research spanning 30 years and interviews with 250,000 sales people, over 1 million customers and 25,000 sales managers, this is what the top sales people have in common:
* They were in the type of sales job where they were able to use their top talents every day
* They developed their own unique selling style based on their top talents
* They had a productive relationship with their manager.

Since the top 25 % of the sales force accounts for 57% of the sales revenue in most organizations, the more sales people get to use their top talents, the more likely they are to build a sustainable and profitable customer base.

So, how do you discover your individual strengths and talents? One of the unique features of this book is that you go to an Internet site and take an assessment that will immediately tell you what your top five strengths are. What I found intriguing is that these strengths are much more practical than the strengths I have seen in any other kind of assessment instruments. You can then use the book to determine how to put these strengths to work for you so they become true talents. (By focusing on these strengths I have increased my own productivity by 100%!!)

The other thing I really liked about this book is the easy to read format and the fact that the author includes great real world stories and examples of how top sales people used their talents to excel in their job. The author, Benson Smith, who started his career as a successful salesperson with a Fortune 500 medical device company and eventually became the CEO, writes in clear business language and does not spend a lot of time espousing complicated theories. If anything, the book is too short and leaves you wanting more.

The book also talks about the key role that managers play in insuring the success of the sales effort. The chapter on management should be required reading for anyone who is a manager or thinks they want to become one. (You will also find this chapter extremely helpful if your current manager is less than ideal.)

I have spent over 20 years in the medical and pharmaceutical industry in sales, management, marketing and training. Over the last 9 years, I have had a successful business focused on performance development consulting and training. This book has inspired me to rethink my approach. I hope it will do the same for others in my profession. Most organizations tie training to "improvement opportunities." Gallup's research has found that training will be far more productive if you focus on strengths and how to build them into true talents.

I will first tell you that I have read thousands of books over the course of my life, many were books on business and sales. This is the first time that I have ever felt compelled to write a review. Also this is the first time I ever read a business book and then felt disappointed when the book was over, I would normally feel that way at the end of a particularly good novel.
I'll just have to go and buy all the other books in the series.

The information imparted by "Discovering Your Sales Strengths" has had a profound impact on me. Undoubtedly many salespeople that read the book will suddenly understand their own career a whole lot better. And hopefully this will be the beginning of the end of unenlightened and just plain dumb sales management.

This book has also greatly improved my overall confidence. I will probably be changing jobs later this year and I'll actually really know what kinds of jobs to aggressively pursue.

Once again the Gallup organization, specifically Benson Smith and Tony Ruttigliano, deliver a good usable book to help improve your career based on strengths. This book begins with Gallup's common message, based on research, that if you focus on what you are good at; you will get better at it. This book continues on showing you what makes up a these strengths, based on a combination of talents which cluster together and come out as things like Competition, Empathy, and Command. This book will allow you to focus more on how you are wired, and what you have, than what you do not, and will never have.

Most importantly this book gives you access to your 'Top Five' strengths, or patterns for success. These strengths, ranging from Harmony to Woo, will show you how you alone are as unique as 1 in 30 million people. The book could have been 5 stars if Gallup would have provided more patterns of strength and how they work in sales careers, they only give you a few morsels from their vault of knowledge and what patterns and combinations of strengths work in sales. They do let you in on the fact that Competition, Command and Empathy were themes commonly found in successful sales-agents.

Overall this book is an A-, another great work from Gallup based on research, not just theory.

Joseph Dworak

DO NOT buy this book if you've already read the Gallup Organization's earlier book, 'Now, Discover Your Strengths' by Buckingham. They're almost identical and you really learn nothing new in 'Sales.' Having taken the StrengthFinders tests for both books, I found that 3 of 5 strengths were the same for me. In addition, I found that 'Sales Strengths' did nothing to tell me what sales environment or type of sales I should be in. The authors did a poor job of applying the theoretical strengths to practical sales environments and telling me that if I have x strength I should seek y sales job. Overall, the 'Sales' book read like a very long instruction guide to the test. Caveat emptor...

After leaving a sales position in a company I helped start I felt very frustrated. I could not understand why my sales performance was so poor in a company that I cared so deeply about. My conclusion was that I must be a [lousy] sales guy. WRONG!

This book taught me that sales success comes from finding and using my talents. This requires that I work in a role that allows me to fully leverage those talents. This was a wonderful insight for me and I feel a great deal of gratitude to the authors for giving me the direction I was looking for. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who felt success was eluding them in their sales career.

However, anyone looking to see the documented research may not be satisfied. Sure, there are some juicy morsels to enjoy along the way, but most often I kept wanting to go deeper into the research. The authors' evangelistic style keeps the reader on the straight and narrow. I would have liked the opportunity to draw some of my own conclusions.

The supporting website makes this book an incredible value. The online assessment was excellent. Similar tests cost companies hundreds of dollars. The book, along with the assessment, was exactly what I was looking for while I make my next big career decision.

I love the Gallup books. Gallup really takes human capital management to the next level. This is not for HR Departments - managers need to work with their employees directly by learning and absorbing the concepts in the Gallup books. It is definitely not for the closed minded reader. All of the principles of the books need to be engaged and used carefully by both employees and their managers.

Just opening a page of the book can shake a person's prior beliefs: for example, the book unequivocally states that experience is NOT the determinant of sales performance. Another example: "good" salespeople are usually not good at selling all types of products. Of course, the book allows the reader to take the strengths finder via the internet (perhaps for the second time, as was my case). Again, the reader needs to carefully consider the results and use the book as a guide to act accordingly.

I like how the authors define talents (generally speaking in the Gallup universe, any repeating pattern of feeling, thought, or behavior that can be productively applied). The reader can then observe which strengths he or she has that fit with a particular sales role (page 90): our motivation, the way we build relationships, the way we gain commitments, the structure we need to get our work done, and our ability to understand and solve customer needs.

Overall the book is very comprehensive, though succinct (implying that those who wrote the book and the editors have special talents of their own!). It introduces the Q12, the "Manager Effect", customer engagement, and a section entitled "Advice for the World's Best Sales Managers". The Appendix lists and defines the 34 different talents/themes (as mentioned, the internet test will tell you your top five). One caveat: this is very personal information, and in the wrong hands it can be very harmful. Carefully and properly used, the book is probably the best scientific resource available for the business world because it is readily understood and applied yet very sophisticated. Very appropriate for those in sales or thinking about a career in sales. econ

Our company employs Gallup to do their strengths training and everyone of our sales reps gets this book when they are hired on. Fantastic!

If you are familiar with Strengthsfinder and you need to develop a sales force or, to a lesser degree, your own personal sales techniques, then this is a good purchase. On the otherhand, the other books are not a pre-req. There is enough intro to Strengthsfinder concepts reading the previous works that this book can give someone the basics if a sales focus is the only goal. I consider Strengthsfinder so valuable, that I'm glad to have read both.

Excellent material! (I do like the original, "Now, Discover your strengths", better as a book. I think the original is more smoothly written, but sales people like to read sales examples.)
We are using this book with our(pharma)sales reps and also with the corporate personel they work with. This book and the strengthsfinder assessment helps sales people identify their strengths and really focus on them. I have moved to this model in my sales skills training as well as in our performance management model and coaching sessions.

This book is great for those who have not read Now, Discover Your Strengths. There are some great statistics and ideas for sales managers, however, not too great for sales personnel. I would have liked to have seen more of a sales oriented spin on the interpretation strengthfinder assessment. It was the same interpretation as the assessment for Now, Discover Your Strengths.