Sales isn't about pushing products or being efficient; it's about building the right systems to manage and empower your salespeople.

If you read nothing else on sales, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review; articles and selected the most important ones to help you understand how to create the conditions for sales success.

This book will inspire you to:

Understand your customer's buying center
Integrate your sales and marketing operations
Assess your business cycle and its impact on your sales force
Transition away from solution sales
Leverage the power of micromarkets
Introduce tiebreaker selling and consensus selling
Motivate your sales force properly

This collection of articles includes: "Major Sales: Who Really Does the Buying," by Thomas V. Bonoma; "Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing," by Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, and Suj Krishnaswamy; "Match Your Sales Force Structure to Your Business Life Cycle," by Andris A. Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha, and Sally E. Lorimer; "The End of Solution Sales," by Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman; "Selling into Micromarkets," by Manish Goyal, Maryanne Q. Hancock, and Homayoun Hatami; "Dismantling the Sales Machine," by Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman; "Tiebreaker Selling," by James C. Anderson, James A. Narus, and Marc Wouters; "Making the Consensus Sale," by Karl Schmidt, Brent Adamson, and Anna Bird; "The Right Way to Use Compensation," by Mark Roberge; "How to Really Motivate Salespeople," by Doug J. Chung; and "Getting Beyond 'Show Me the Money,'" an interview with Andris Zoltners by Daniel McGinn.

James C Anderson