Presales professionals: sharpen your pencils and brace yourselves for knowledge overload! We’re about to embark on a literary odyssey that will lead you to unprecedented sales prowess and career-defining wins.
Let’s paint a presales picture: Companies that optimize their presales strategy see a five-point boost in conversion rates, a 6% to 13% improvement in revenue growth, and a 10-20 percent shorter sales cycle. How can you reach this presales success? Start with this list!
This updated collection of reads is your secret weapon to raise your game and propel you to the top of the presales ladder. These handpicked books contain an arsenal of insights and strategies from the industry’s brightest minds.
Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or looking to start your presales career, these gems will polish your skills, ignite your passion, and prepare you to take on anything your customers, competitors, or collaborators throw at you.
If you want tighter discovery and cleaner deal paths, you’re in the right place. These picks give you specific frameworks and questions you can use in your very next customer call to uncover real business drivers and steer mutual plans.
Selling Is Hard. Buying Is Harder. is the definitive work on buyer enablement, a strategy that sees revenue teams give buyers the information and tools they need to decide to make a purchase on their own time and at their own pace. Essentially, your buyer sells themselves on your product. Put buyers in the driver’s seat and help solve today’s problem with overly complex sales cycles.
Release Date: June 8, 2020
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Nearly 80% of B2B customers say that their last purchase was way too difficult. It’s true that buying has gotten so much harder, which is why presales professionals need this book to help them give buyers what they really want: self-service tools that let them explore at their own pace and unpack how your product solves their particular use case.
Discovery is where presales wins or silently loses, and Doing Discovery is a field guide for getting it right. Cohan teaches a structured way to move past surface requirements into real business stakes, then use what you uncover to shape a clearer decision path for the buyer. If you want to level up good discovery and make your demos feel inevitable, this book gives you a repeatable ladder of questions and outcomes you can run on every deal; the kind that naturally supports buyer enablement instead of leaving champions to stitch the case together alone.
Release Date: August 5, 2022
Where to Buy: Amazon
Why Sales People Love It: This book turns discovery from an art into something you can practice and improve. It shows exactly how to progress from pain to impact to a buyer-owned problem statement, so the deal has direction before the demo even starts. Teams also like the provided coaching vocabulary: They can review a call together, name exactly where discovery stopped progressing, and agree on the right follow-up without risk of miscommunication.
Buyer indecision is the quiet killer The Jolt Effect goes after. Instead of assuming stalls happen because you didn’t create enough urgency, it shows how deals freeze when the choice feels risky, complicated, or politically unsafe for the buyer. The JOLT framework gives presales and sales teams specific ways to reduce that friction and master objection handling so a great demo doesn’t end in a polite maybe.
Release Date: September 20, 2022
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Instead of generic “create urgency” advice, The Jolt Effect provides a clear playbook for the hardest part of modern deals: Getting multi-stakeholder buyers unstuck without pushing them.
Deal Crash looks at lost enterprise deals the way aviation teams study accidents; not as one big mistake, but as a chain of small, preventable breakdowns. The book teaches a no-blame way to run win/loss investigations, spot the real root causes (discovery gaps, missed stakeholders, demo drift, weak mutual plans), and build habits that steadily raise win rates over time.
Release Date: August 26, 2022
Where to Buy: Amazon
Why Sales People Love It: Sales and presales teams like that Deal Crash forces clarity on where the deal went off course and why so improvements are specific and actionable. The aviation-style root-cause approach also makes deal reviews safer and more honest, which means teams get real signals they can coach to.
The New Solution Selling is the groundbreaking sequel to Solution Selling. Expanding on the successes of its prequel, you’ll get updated philosophies, tools to increase pipeline, and management systems. This book is applicable to any industry and is performance-focused to help you achieve the best results.
Release Date: December 5, 2003
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: This book makes presales teams more solution-oriented, offering answers to how to solve today’s biggest selling problems. This mindset enables them to help sellers get unstuck during sales cycles and move buyers down the pipeline more efficiently.
It’s not just what you tell your customers—it’s what you ask them. Asking questions will help uncover information about your customers, but only if you ask in a systematic way. Ask More gives you insights into asking the right questions in any situation. With real-world examples from The Gates Foundation, Anderson Cooper, and Uber, you’ll master the art of asking the right questions.
Release Date: January 10, 2017
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Today’s buyers expect personalized sales interactions, but you can’t personalize toward what you don’t know. Asking more systematic questions helps you learn about your customer’s needs, wants, and use cases, all essential to ensure you’re personalizing their entire product experience.
If your demos are solid but not consistently decisive, consider these books the next additions to your presales reading list. Find practical techniques for structuring narrative, handling live pivots, and landing the “so what” that moves deals forward.
If you’ve ever watched a demo drift into a feature tour, this book is the reset. It teaches the Great Demo! method, which involves starting with the buyer’s situation and desired outcomes, designing a tight storyline, and using tools like a demo agenda and situational framing to keep everything anchored to value. This gives demos a repeatable structure that works under real pressure.
Release Date: July 6, 2023
Where to Buy: Amazon
Why Sales People Love It: The methodology sharpens what buyers remember and repeat internally, makes demo prep faster and less stressful, and gives managers a concrete way to coach demos beyond subjective feedback. Over time, it creates a noticeable lift in demo-to-next-step conversion because presenters stop chasing every feature request and stay focused on what actually moves the deal.
Demo Guru is a practical guide to becoming the kind of SE buyers trust quickly. The focus is less on slides and more on credibility, including how to show up as the steady, technical voice of the deal, translate complexity into outcomes, and build a tight connection between sales, presales, and the customer. It’s especially useful for SEs who want to sharpen presence in virtual, cloud-era selling without losing their technical backbone.
Release Date: January 14, 2021
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Readers like that it’s grounded in real enterprise situations, with advice that helps newer SEs ramp faster and veterans refine the behaviors that turn deep product knowledge into buyer trust and executive-level presence.
A classic for anyone who has to demo complex products without losing the room, Demonstrating to Win! shows how to turn dense technology into a guided proof journey buyers can actually follow. It focuses on pre-demo framing, narrative flow, and pacing, helping you move stakeholders from curiosity to conviction by turning technical detail into meaning.
Release Date: July 20, 2011
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Sales engineers keep this book in rotation because it’s timeless on the fundamentals: structure, storytelling, and simplifying complexity for decision-makers. It’s especially valued by SEs who demo sophisticated products to mixed audiences because it helps them stay crisp and persuasive without dumbing anything down.
Ted Talks are the new gold standard for presentations, and there’s plenty you can steal from that format for your own presentations. Experienced public speaking coach, Carmine Gallo, broke down hundreds of TED Talks and interviewed popular speakers and top researchers to find what makes these presentations so unique. He discovered nine elements every successful TED Talk has, and now he’s sharing them with you.
Release Date: March 4, 2014
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Not only does this book help you hone your presentation skills, but it also teaches readers how to truly connect with their audience—a necessary ability for presales professionals.
Does your audience leave presentations feeling inspired or just feeling tired? Unless you can get your audience to resonate with your message, they’re going to ignore what you have to say. Resonate explains how making a deep connection with your audience is simple if you treat it like a documentary. Documentaries are the perfect format for delivering information in a captivating and persuasive way. Leave behind boring presentations and make your next presentation resonate.
Release Date: September 28, 2010
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Resonate offers sellers a new perspective on presentations, one that can help them overcome public speaking challenges, build on their communication skills, and, overall, become more effective in their roles. Turn your presales team into storytellers, and you’ll reap the rewards.
Virtual selling is now default, with this book providing on-camera training for presales teams. Look Me In The Eye pulls from actors and broadcasters to show how to create connection through a lens (voice, eye line, posture, energy) and the micro-behaviors that make you feel trustworthy on-screen.
Release Date: September 27, 2021
Where to Buy: Amazon
Why Sales People Love It: This book fixes a quiet performance gap: You can have the right message and still lose the room if you don’t feel present on-screen. Its advice is specific and immediately usable, so SEs see fast improvements in rapport, clarity, and authority on video calls and demos.
There’s a science to crafting a perfect pitch. In Pitch Anything, Oren Klaff shares his tried and tested formula for delivering a great pitch every time. Become a pitching master with the latest research in neuroeconomics and the STRONG pitching method. Stop using outdated methods and start using tactics that work.
Release Date: January 26, 2011
Where to Buy: Amazon or Bookshop
Why Sales People Love It: You only have eight seconds to grab your audience’s attention, so your pitch really, really matters. This guide helps presales teams craft a pitch that’s scientifically proven to capture someone’s attention.
Effective presales strategies boost everything from revenue to seller retention to customer loyalty. With these books, you’ll learn how the pros find presales success, giving you the insider knowledge you need to drive that success in your own company.
You might notice that many of these books talk about learning to think like a buyer. If we could impart one additional tip regarding presales, it would be this: buyer enablement should always be at the core of your presales strategy. In a world of increasingly more complex buying journeys, buyer enablement gives your customers everything they need to make it simple.
That drive is at the heart of Consensus. Consensus is the world’s first Product Experience Platform, offering buyer enablement tools that give your customers everything they need to have a stress-free buying, customer, and overall product experience.
Learn how Consensus can help you boost your presales buyer enablement.
There’s nuance in presales: what you say, what you don’t, and how it reads across screens and cultures. These picks help you communicate clearly across email, chat, video, and global teams, so your message lands the way you intend in any context.
Humans rely on body language for context and understanding, so what do we do now that we’re all online? Communicating through a screen might have added some additional complexity to how we understand each other, but that inherent understanding isn’t lost completely. Digital Body Language breaks down the new social cues that have popped up in our now virtual world. Turn miscommunications into real communication.
Release Date: May 11, 2021
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Digital selling requires sellers to engage three senses: sight, sound, and feel. And the only way we understand how to target these senses is if we understand our buyer’s digital body language. This guide helps us decode our buyers’ signals to better address their needs and wants.
Our culture influences the way we communicate. Americans tend to be overly nice before delivering negative comments while Germans and Dutch are known for being brutally honest and getting right to the point. Knowing someone’s background and how they approach certain situations can help avoid misperceptions and confrontation. The Culture Map provides a tested model for decoding different cultures and having more productive conversations.
Release Date: May 27, 2014
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Miscommunications can knock a sale off course quickly. This book keeps those sorts of mishaps at bay, allowing presales professionals to essentially become translators, learning to speak the language of their audience all around the world.
To win customers, you have to think like your customer. Bill Stinnett found the biggest complaint he heard from clients was that the people selling to them just didn’t understand their business. Think Like Your Customer breaks down why it’s so critical to understand the inner workings of the industries you sell into and how you can use that information to create a winning strategy.
Release Date: October 29, 2004
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Customer-centric companies grow their revenue 4% to 8% higher than their competition. Studies show that when you think like your customer, you boost customer retention, loyalty, and confidence.
Here you’ll find books to help you focus in an interruption-heavy role, stay resilient in late-stage pressure, and keep your learning curve steep without burning out.
A Mind for Sales is a practical guide to building the mental habits that keep sellers consistent through rejection, long cycles, and chaotic quarters. Hunter centers the book on his success cycle mindset and the daily routines that reinforce confidence, momentum, and proactive selling instead of waiting for motivation to show up.
Release Date: March 31, 2020
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: The book is equal parts mindset reset and operating system. It helps sellers spot the moment they’re slipping into reactive mode, then gives concrete, repeatable habits to get back to progress quickly, especially around consistency and resilience when pipeline pressure hits.
This is a research-backed guide to timing work for better results. Pink explains how energy and attention rise and fall across the day, why beginnings, middles, and endings shape decisions, and how to schedule tasks so they land when you’re at your best. The ideas translate directly into smarter presales productivity (planning deep work, call blocks, and prep around your real peaks) and more intentional buyer enablement (thinking about when buyers are most likely to engage with demos and next steps).
Release Date: January 8, 2019
Where to Buy: Amazon or Bookshop
Why Sales People Love It: For SEs dealing with constant context switching, it’s a solid guide for designing a weekly rhythm that protects prep and deep work, making performance more consistent across the quarter.
Lifescale is all about self-discovery and growth, filled with scientific research and tools to help people overcome distractions and become happier and more productive. Discover techniques, exercises, and thought experiments that help you keep the chaos at bay and learn to embrace each day.
Release Date: March 6, 2019
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Not all presales books are about, well, sales. Presales is also about giving sellers tools, strategies, and training that help them become better in their roles. This book is a perfect addition to sales training.
The ONE Thing offers a sharp, simple productivity framework built around one question: What’s the ONE thing you can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary? It makes a strong case against multitasking and busywork, and shows how to use ruthless prioritization, time-blocking, and goal alignment to drive outsized results.
Release Date: April 1, 2013
Where to Buy: Amazon or Bookshop
Why Sales People Love It: This book cuts through the chaos of modern selling with a decision rule you can use in real-time. It’s also popular with managers because it gives a shared way to talk about focus and trade-offs, which helps teams stay aligned on what matters most in a quarter.
Whether you’re stepping into leadership or want to be ready when the time comes, these titles map the path. Use them to level up coaching, stakeholder management, and the kind of strategic thinking that earns bigger scopes.
Built for the leap from high-performing SE to presales leader, this handbook lays out the 3+1 Rules of SE Leadership as a simple operating system for the role. The guidance stays grounded in real SE org realities (like hiring, onboarding, coaching, metrics, and cross-functional alignment) so you’re not inventing the job from scratch.
Release Date: April 21, 2020
Where to Buy: Amazon or Bookshop
Why Sales People Love It: New managers like having a practical map for the first year of what to focus on, what to stop doing, and how to coach different styles instead of cloning their own. Veteran leaders keep coming back to it because the 3+1 Rules make org health easy to diagnose. They quickly see whether gaps stem from talent development, operating cadence, or customer coverage, and can pull the right lever to fix them.
A practical guide for SEs who want to become trusted advisors to their buyers, this book breaks down what trust looks like in presales, how to build it deliberately, and how to show up as a credible guide who can challenge assumptions, shape better outcomes, and lead buyers through complexity. It focuses less on demo mechanics and more on the behaviors and mindset that make buyers rely on you when decisions feel risky.
Release Date: June 14, 2020
Where to Buy: Amazon or Bookshop
Why Sales People Love It: Reading this book helps SEs show up more deliberately in high-stakes evaluations, shifting their influence away from piling on features or performing harder demos and toward calm credibility and buyer-guiding judgment.
This is the kind of presales book you finish and immediately think about your next call. White takes what top SEs do in the wild and turns it into six habits you can build on purpose, featuring examples that feel like real deals, real demos, and real internal prep. It’s practical, direct, and written for people who want to get better fast without wading through fluff.
Release Date: June 15, 2019
Where to Buy: Amazon
Why Sales People Love It: The six-habits lens gives teams a fast, concrete way to learn from real calls. After a weak discovery or demo, you can pinpoint exactly which habit slipped and tighten that, instead of guessing or overhauling your whole approach. It also creates a shared standard for coaching SE performance that feels specific and fair, not subjective.
Deals don’t stall on features; they stall on people. The books here teach you how decisions get made, how to shape momentum ethically, and how to negotiate outcomes without trading away trust.
Drawn from real FBI hostage negotiations, Never Split the Difference reframes negotiation as a human, emotional process instead of a rational tug-of-war. Voss teaches tactics like tactical empathy, calibrated questions, mirroring, labeling emotions, and spotting hidden leverage points so you can steer high-stakes conversations toward better outcomes without defaulting to compromise.
Release Date: May 17, 2016
Where to Buy: Amazon or Bookshop
Why Sales People Love It: What makes this book a staple is how usable it is under pressure. It gives sellers a calm, step-by-step way to handle tense moments without getting pulled into sparring or premature concessions, and the examples make it easy to borrow the language and try it the same week.
The Psychology of Selling is about the mental mechanics behind consistent selling. Tracy argues that performance follows self-concept, then shows how to build that self-concept through deliberate habits like clear goals, disciplined prospecting, and better questioning. It’s part mindset reset, part practical playbook for keeping your selling sharp when the work gets repetitive or rejection-heavy.
Release Date: July 16, 2006
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Sellers come away with a simpler internal script for tough days, plus concrete routines that make confidence less fragile and results more repeatable.
This is the Sandler Selling System in book form. The framework walks through the full Sandler 7-step process and focuses heavily on staying in control of the process, surfacing real pain, and preventing deals from drifting into no-decision limbo. It’s especially helpful for SEs and AEs who want a cleaner way to run good discovery and set expectations early, instead of jumping straight to presenting.
Release Date: March 2, 2015
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: What makes this book stick is how hard it leans on reinforcement. It pushes you to practice the system until it’s second nature, and teams often end up rallying around it as their shared deal rhythm.
Part sales playbook, part survival story, this book follows Brem’s climb from a broke single mom with a terminal diagnosis into a dealership owner and sales powerhouse. Along the way, she shares the strategies that worked for her in real, high-pressure selling, especially the strengths she argues many women bring naturally: strong listening, sharp people-reading, persistence without steamrolling, and a knack for earning trust fast. It’s practical, high-energy, and repeatedly reminds you that selling is a life skill as much as it is a career.
Release Date: March 17, 2005
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Because the advice comes packaged with real stakes, the takeaways land as credible and urgent. The book validates a trust-first, human style of selling and shows how to make that style decisive, not soft.
Instead of treating rejection as something to avoid, Go for No! argues that collecting “no” is the cleanest path to more “yes” because it pushes you into higher activity, faster learning, and less emotional flinch. The takeaway: Set goals around the number of no’s you’re willing to get, and the yes’s follow as a by-product.
Release Date: January 10, 2019
Where to Buy: Amazon
Why Sales People Love It: The “go for no” target gives sellers permission to be bold, detach from the emotional sting of rejection, and measure success by controllable effort instead of luck. Teams like how lightweight and memorable it is, and how easily it turns into a shared challenge that boosts prospecting volume, resilience, and momentum—especially during dry spells.
Your credibility often reaches buyers before you do. These selections show how to share expertise, build a durable reputation, and create pull in your market without becoming “always on” or too salesy.
If LinkedIn feels like a place you should be using more but never quite turns into pipeline, this book shows you how to make it work. Disney writes like a coach who’s been in the trenches, walking you through how to show up credibly, find the right people without doom-scrolling, start conversations that don’t feel like cold pitches, and stay visible in a way that builds trust over time. The Ultimate LinkedIn Sales Guide is practical, current, and geared toward turning LinkedIn into a steady social selling habit.
Release Date: June 1, 2021
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Instead of talking about personal branding in the abstract, this guide shows exactly what to do on a Tuesday morning to get in front of the right buyers and stay there. The messaging examples are concrete, the content advice is grounded in what actually gets responses, and the system scales from one rep to a whole team.
If you’ve ever wondered how SEs stay valuable in a world of demo automation and AI, consider this book your blueprint. Pissang argues that the modern Sales Engineer can’t rely on product knowledge alone; you have to develop original points of view, build a visible professional brand, and show up as a trusted advisor both online and in the deal. The Social Sales Engineer guides sellers through the process of earning real thought leadership and building reputation in a way that compounds over time.
Release Date: September 4, 2021
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: Newer SEs get a clear model for how to grow beyond being the technical helper, while veterans appreciate the push to refresh their voice and influence in the market.
This book is a wake-up call for modern B2B selling and presales. It highlights how today’s buyers do most of their learning without you and the old prospecting and demo motions don’t work the way they used to. Rule of 24 is a practical reset for how to engage earlier, add value in digital channels, and stay relevant through long, self-directed evaluations—with an emphasis on demos as buyer experiences.
Release Date: July 8, 2018
Where to Buy: Amazon, Bookshop, or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: B2B buyers expect fast, polished engagement and have little patience for slow handoffs or wandering evaluations. Rule of 24 gives sales people a real-world checklist for staying sharp in that environment, especially around how to respond quickly, stay relevant between meetings, and design demo experiences that hold up when buyers are evaluating on their own.
For SEs who want to systematize their craft, this is the toolbox. These technical-methodology reads help you standardize discovery-to-demo workflows, align with product and sales, and scale what works across opportunities.
Digital selling today doesn’t look like how it did 10 years ago—or perhaps even just two years ago. This book introduces the concept of Insight Selling, allowing sellers to tap into their analytics and expertise to learn to not just sell a product but to provide value to buyers. Learn to navigate changing technologies, identify shifting market trends, and target customer needs.
Release Date: May 11, 2024
Where to Buy: Amazon
Why Sales People Love It: Insight Selling goes beyond traditional selling. It’s not about selling a product as much as it is about selling the “why” of the product. Why was it made, and why is it the right product for you? This type of selling is more impactful and engaging, with 89% of B2B buyers saying that the vendors they decided to buy from provided information that built a business case for their purchase. This book helps presales pros guide their sellers into adopting Insight Selling.
Release Date: November 8, 2023
Where to Buy: Amazon
Why Sales People Love It: This book gives SEs a clear playbook for building champions who know what to say, how to say it, and why it matters, with templates and frameworks that are easy to apply mid-deal.
This high-output sales playbook is built around what separates top 1% performers from everyone else. It focuses on filling pipeline with the right prospects, running efficient outreach that gets replies, and tightening execution from first conversation to close. The playbook is practical and habit-oriented, with frameworks for working smarter, cutting wasted activity, and keeping momentum without burning yourself out.
Release Date: August 10, 2022
Where to Buy: Amazon or Barnes & Noble
Why Sales People Love It: This book doesn’t romanticize hustle; it shows how to spot the activities that look productive but don’t pay, then replace them with habits that reliably create pipeline and closed won revenue. It feels like a top performer telling you how they actually run a week, complete with the small discipline moves that add up to big numbers.
Effective presales strategies boost everything from revenue to seller retention to customer loyalty. With these books, you’ll learn how the pros find presales success, giving you the insider knowledge you need to drive that success in your own company.
You might notice that many of these books talk about learning to think like a buyer. If we could impart one additional tip regarding presales, it would be this: buyer enablement should always be at the core of your presales strategy. In a world of increasingly more complex buying journeys, buyer enablement gives your customers everything they need to make it simple.
That drive is at the heart of Consensus. Consensus is the world’s first AI-powered demo automation platform, offering buyer enablement tools that give your customers everything they need to have a stress-free buying, customer, and overall product experience.
Learn how Consensus can help you boost your presales buyer enablement.