Book Review: Sales Manager Survival Guide—Lessons from Sales’ Front Lines

Reading time ( words)

Sales Manager Survival Guide: Lessons from Sales’ Front Lines

by David Brock

Copyright 2016 David Brock

Price $14.95 Kindle edition

Sales Manager Survival Guide is a perfect book for a new sales manager. It is also important for those of us who have been in sales for many years, because it contains everything you need to become a great sales manager. Truth be known, it is the most comprehensive book on sales management I have ever read. This book is not filled with tips, but rather actual guidelines on how to do things. It is more of an instructional book than a guidebook. If you answer “yes” to any of the following questions, this book is for you:

• Do you want to know how to find and hire the perfect sales person?
• Do you want to work on performance improvement with someone on your team who is not performing up to snuff?
• Do you want to set fair and equitable compensation packages?
• Do you want to know how to coach your team? 

How about firing someone? Or managing your manager? Or gaining listening skills? Or doing a successful ride along with your sales person? Or how to successfully deliver effective performance reviews? Or developing sales tactics? Or measuring your sales team’s performance? Or planning your future in sales management? This book shows you how to do all of these things and more. It is all here in this interesting, provocative and easy to understand book.

I especially like the author’s approach to the hard subjects like talking to your sales people about increasing their sales efficiency and helping them with their time management.

This guy truly gets it, and he is very good at helping us to get it, such as when he points out that a good CRM tool is designed to help a salesperson become more effective and efficient in her work, not simply to let a manager know what she is doing.

As I consultant whose job is to help sales managers become great sales managers, this is the most important tool I have come across in a long time. I have recommended this book to all of my clients and will continue to do so in the future. If you are a salesperson and are serious about your career path, I forbid you to go another day without reading this book.

02/09/2023 | Globe Newswire

TTM Technologies, Inc., a leading global manufacturer of technology solutions including engineered systems, radio frequency (RF) components and RF microwave/microelectronic assemblies, and printed circuit boards (PCB), reported results for the fourth quarter and fiscal 2022, which ended on January 2, 2023.

12/23/2022 | Andy Shaughnessy, Design007 Magazine

In this week leading up to Christmas, we have a little bit of everything. Pete Starkey has a review of the most recent EIPC Technical Snapshot, while Tom Kastner discusses the dwindling number of PCB companies in North America. Are we really down to 170 companies? IPC reports that North American PCB sales up 26.1% in November YOY, and the book-to-bill is dead-on at 1.00. Cybord CEO Zeev Efrat explains how his company can provide 100% component inspection. And I have an interview with a student I ran into at PCB Carolina who is working toward his “dream job” on being a technician. As Alex Barile says, he’d hate to work at a desk all day; he likes to install equipment.

09/28/2022 | Dan Beaulieu, D.B. Management Group

It’s always good to catch up with old friends, especially when you can start working together. I recently spoke with my friend John Johnson, who has joined American Standard Circuits as the director of business development. At ASC, John will be using the Averatek A-SAP process that he was previously involved with. He shares some of his background and provides insight on the best ways to use this semi-additive PCB fabrication process that opens the capability window for forming trace and space.