2017 and 2018 Reading List

This reading list represents my sales career from 2017 to 2018. At that time I read a lot of sales literature to understand the profession. These books were essential to the success of my sales career. Without the knowledge in these books, I would have not gotten as far as I did.

I started in October of 2017 doing inside sales. I was cold/warm calling prospect to resell them their abandoned carts and declined orders. It wasn’t anything to write home about, but it was lucrative if you could sell well.

In the first few months, I crushed the first series of books on the list below. I even listened to the audio versions of the books. I listened to Jordan Belfort’s Straight Line persuasion well before I read the book. I didn’t get a chance to read Way of the Wolf until the new year. Before that, I had listened to straight lines ten times. That’s an 8-hour audio program, so I had already done it for 80 hours as well as applying what I learned at work every day. It was a pretty crazy time, and I would do it all again if I had to.

Some unlikely entries in this list are wrestling literature. I love Professional Wrestling. Oddly enough my sales career got me back into wrestling. At work, we were encouraged to find an anchor for ourselves after we close a deal. This is so that we could snap back into that sales state of pure euphoria at any time. The more you develop your anchor, the stronger it becomes. This is all covered in straight lines by the way. My anchor was the cactus jack pile driver. I had a gif saved on my computer of Cactus Jack pile driving Triple H through a table. It was my anchor and it kept me going. The Cactus Jack WWF debut in the late ’90s was also an incredible match. You can watch it below through the embed.

Triple H is in the ring beakin off, and the titantron plays Mick Foley’s promo. In the promo, he is playing Mankind and Dude Love to introduce Cactus Jack as a new character. For anyone who doesn’t know, Mick Foley aka Cactus Jack cut his teeth in the ECW and WCW well before he got into the WWF as Mankind. So his Cactus Jack character was already developed.

His ring music hits, and outcomes Cactus from behind the curtain. He’s holding a garbage can filled with junk. The first move is Cactus hitting triple H in the head with the garbage can. Junk spills everywhere. Cactus then removes the matting on the outside floor to reveal the concrete. He back rakes Triple H and then takes him over to the exposed floor and delivers a classic Cactus Neck Breaker. That’s the first real wrestling move of the match. Neck breaker on the exposed floor. Absolutely ridiculous.

The match goes all over the venue, it’s a hardcore match, no DQ, falls count anywhere, anything goes. The climax is a table set up in front of the ring entrance. It looks like Triple H is going to give Cactus the pedigree through the table. Nope, Cactus delivers a low blow and pile drives him through the table. Cactus can barley cover Triple H, but he does with his arm for a 3 count. What a match that was on Monday night RAW September 22, 1997.

So Cactus’s “BANG BANG” moniker was my anchor for sales. Every sale I did, I did a BANG BANG!!! Kinda like Shooter McGavin from Happy Gilmour too right?! Sure kinda lame… but it worked for me. Later I changed my sales anchor to the Million Dollar Man. I had to get more aggressive with sales. What better wrestler to think about than The Million Dollar Man Ted Dibiase. Arguably one of the best heel wrestlers of the 20th century. I ended up channeling Million Dollar power to fuel my sales career, and it worked like a dandy.

I needed to be money hungry to make money. Who is more hungry for money than the Million Dollar Man? Everyone’s got a price! Another thing to consider is that Ted Dibiase was already a veteran wrestler by the time he debuted in the WWF. A seasoned technical wrestler from working in the southern non-WWF territories.

By that time I was the seasoned veteran at sales compared to my peers. It was somewhat fitting to play the heel character a bit. Don’t get me wrong I wasn’t acting despicably. I am a nice guy through and through. What I did do was channel a little more aggression.

I did something interesting to develop my anchor. I adopted the Million Dollar dream finishing move into my sales script. I was good with my sales scripts and I had something for everyone. All my calls were a wrestling match.

I let the customer bounce me around a bit to see what they got. Oh, they got a head full of steam? Great, I can let them punch themselves out. When they are out of steam I can wrap em up in the million-dollar dream and they will tap out. Some calls I could powerslam them and slap on the million-dollar dream and wrap it up in 5 minutes, sometimes it took longer. But if you were caught in my cobra clutch, it was over. I could loop you forever until you buy from me.

So without further preface here is the reading list. It is in somewhat chronological order. I started reading the Cardone material in the fall of 2017 and I started on the Hopkins book in the new year of 2018. Then it all goes in order from there.