How to Use This Book
This book was designed with you, the student, in mind. It is useless to teach you how to sell if you don’t also learn how to become resilient, practice confidence, and get over your fear of failure. Yet most, dare I say all, sales textbooks only teach the mechanics of sales—SPIN selling, the sales process, and sales principles—and don’t address the underlying issues for sales, and life, success: overcoming fear of failure, practicing resilience, and becoming confident. If you want to learn about sales principles and the sales process read a traditional sales textbook. There are many good ones on the market and I’m happy to give recommendations.
Contrary to a traditional sales textbook, Women in Sales—both the book and the course—teaches you the underlying foundation of sales. If you are afraid to take a risk (i.e., ask for the sale), if you lack confidence, or if you lack resilience and stop at the first rejection, you’ll never make it in sales or in a sales course. Good news. These are all teachable skills and you will learn and practice them throughout the Women in Sales course and by reading this book and practicing the exercises included.
While this book follows the same order as the topics are discussed in the course, don’t feel obligated to read this book from cover to cover. It’s designed so you can skip around and read the topics you find most interesting or that you need to practice. The purposely short chapters are designed so that you can pick up a topic that is important to you, get a grasp of the concept, perform the prescribed activities to practice, and feel competent in the skill. In addition, class time goes quickly. At least, for me it does. And I hope the material we discuss in class is so interesting to you that the time we spend together flies by for you too. This book is designed to be a reference and review of the material we cover in class not available in traditional textbooks or any other book I know of. So if you want to read it cover to cover, that’s great too. The bottom line is that this e-book is designed to supplement the material we cover in Women in Sales and allow you to become subject experts in power, risk, resilience, and confidence. My hope is that the Women in Sales course and book inspires you to read my forthcoming (Spring 2025) book Women & Power: Your Guidebook to Risk, Resilience, and Confidence available for purchase in paperback or Kindle. And yes, I’d love to autograph a copy for you and your friends.
One of my favorite authors, Beth Moore, said “I’ve never written a book out of expertise. I write to discover something I myself am yearning for.” The same holds true for me. I didn’t develop the Women in Sales course out of expertise. OK—so I do have some expertise on women in sales thanks to my dissertation and published academic research. But what I really needed to learn was how to get over my fear of failure, practice resilience, and become confident. The Women in Sales course, and its outcome—my books—is where I learned those skills so I could teach them to you. Thank you for being on this journey with me.
