With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing people to spend much more time at home, many are taking the opportunity to get caught up on their reading list. In stressful, uncertain times, picking up a new book or two can be entertaining and even calming. For your sales team, this could even become a time of learning and self-improvement.

We are always on the lookout for interesting perspectives on sales strategies—particularly when most employees are stuck at home and looking for some motivation. Here, we count down five great books to motivate your sales team:

1. Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide for Starting Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, and Cold Calling: Thanks to COVID-19, nearly all salespeople are suddenly in the telemarketing business, which makes this audiobook a good fit for our times.
   
   Author Jeb Blount explores the importance of prospecting in order to avoid an empty pipeline—which he describes as the top reason people fail in sales.
   
   With a focus on remote sales methods—particularly cold calling and email—the book trains listeners to develop their prospecting “muscle” and provides plenty of inspiring real-world examples.
      
2. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as If Your Life Depended On It: Written by a former FBI hostage negotiator, this is not your typical business book. Chris Voss believes that life is a series of negotiations you should prepare for—and that is especially true if you work in sales.
   
   He spent his career as one of the FBI’s top negotiators, going up against bank robbers, terrorists, and kidnappers to save lives in some of the most tense, high-stakes situations imaginable.
   
   Fascinating and highly readable, his book explores nine principles that will help you leverage emotional intelligence and intuition to improve your skills of persuasion at work and in your personal life. 
   
   
3. The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation: Encourage your sales reps to hone their skills with a book that challenges the conventional wisdom that all business is fundamentally about relationships. The authors of The Challenger Sale claim that classic relationship building is outdated and unproductive in most cases.
   
   Instead, “challengers” succeed by challenging their customers’ thinking and presenting valuable insights that will help them succeed. Leveraging insights gleaned from an exhaustive study of thousands of salespeople, the book promises to provide the tweaks many sales reps need to move quickly and confidently to the next level, no matter where they are today.
   
   
4. Ninja Selling: Subtle Skills. Big Results.: This best-selling book offers a step-by-step guide for adopting an all-new selling approach, with the goal of shifting sales reps from chasing to attracting clients. Author Larry Kendall promises a science-based system that goes beyond sales and also offers “a path to personal mastery and life purpose.” Fans of Ninja Selling are adamant that it works, even for introverted or non-sales types.
   
   
5. To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others: A global pandemic is arguably the perfect time to delve into a book that explores human nature. This one delves into key insights from social science to explain why “we’re all in sales now.”
   
   This highly rated book includes plenty of simple takeaways that will motivate your sales team, including six new ways to give an elevator pitch, how to better understand your customers’ perspectives, and five steps to make your pitches clearer and more persuasive.  

Keep up Your Sales Momentum

Of course, recommending an inspiring book or two isn’t the only way to motivate your sales team during these strange times. Many companies are also bolstering their teams and setting their people up for success by outsourcing sales support with a Sales as a Service® partner. 

By outsourcing sales support, your team can focus on what they do best and leave other tasks, such as lead qualification or managing less-profitable markets, to an external team. While business gradually returns to normal, leveraging the potential of Sales as a Service can ensure that you and your team don’t lose your sales momentum. 

Learn more about the benefits of outsourcing sales support, and how Sales as a Service works, in our e-book, Sales as a Service—The MarketStar Advantage.