Tom Hopkins. Selling for Dummies: Third Edition. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2011. 362 pages.
If you’re in sales, you’re probably always looking for that extra edge. If you’re not, you’d probably like to know a little more about how salespeople get you to sign. In either case, Tom Hopkins’ SELLING FOR DUMMIES is a good read.
It’s a basic primer on how to sell, and how to improve your selling technique. Hopkins walks the reader through the seven-step selling cycle with pointers on how to improve each step of the way. He intersperses his instruction with stories of his own sales background, which makes for both good diversions and real-life application of his principles.
As a “For Dummies” book, the emphasis is on basic, easy-to-understand instruction rather than deep discussion. And the reader will have to do most of the work of connecting Hopkins’ advice, which is necessarily general enough to cover a broad range of sales-related fields, to his/her own work.
In general, the pointers Hopkins offers seems to be good. Much of what he says will likely not be news to experienced sellers, but one of the values of basic instruction books like this is to confirm what you already knew and give you a base for adding to it. Similarly, much of it is stuff that the average salesperson could probably figure out for themselves, given enough time. With this book, however, you’ll save a lot of time, which is probably the point.
If approached with the mindset that this is a book that will help you put in the right effort to refine your selling skills, rather than the expectation that this book will give you shortcuts to tripling your sales with no additional effort, SELLING FOR DUMMIES has a lot of value. If you are in sales, it probably won’t be the last instructional or motivational book you read, but it makes for a good start. And if you’re a consumer, it’s a nice peek into the world of salespeople.