Reading books is one of the greatest ways to equip yourself with new skills and knowledge to become a great professional, especially in business. Reading business development books is capable of setting you up for success.
There are lots of business development books to pick from, and they will give you an all-around base to build yourself for business success.
But, what is Business Development? It simply refers to the innovation and creativity of long-lasting value via the commitment of a company or group from markets, industries, customers, and relationships.
This article will be highlighting some of the best business development books that can give information into the business industry and help build your business career.
Best Business Development Books
These books will not only give you great insight on how to level up your business career, but they will also teach you some specific skills in your business development career, which will help catapult you to the heights you’ve always dreamt of.
Read on to see the list of the ten best and most popular business development books that can take your career to greater heights.
1. The Sumo Advantage (Author: Bernie Brenner)
The Sumo Advantage is one of the best and most popular business development books. It will help you to discover how to easily and perfectly build strong and strategic partnerships that can catapult your business to greater heights.
It will teach you how you can best leverage strong partnerships with popular and notable companies known as Fortune 1000 companies, thereby, catapulting you to a new height. Do not miss out on this book, especially if you are a starter in business.
2. The Sales Acceleration Formula (Author: Mark Roberge)
With this book by Mark Roberge, you will gain lots of valuable information on how you can easily develop an outreach strategy.
It will teach you how to begin with targeting and then to build an amazing team. The sales acceleration formula will give you every insight on how to start developing your business.
You will benefit from Mark Roberge’s experience as a member of Hubspot, CRO to be precise, on how they were able to rapidly grow the firm courtesy of their sales efforts.
Business development leaders can learn from the book since it features essential insights on how to create and manage your first team. You can also watch some of his inspiring videos on Linkedin.
3. Hacking Sales (Author: Max Altschuler)
If you are a modern-day business development manager, then this is the book specifically for you. It contains all the answers you have been asking yourself yet don’t always find the answers to.
For instance, hacking sales answers the questions to how to find leads, how to maximize your outreach, through the author’s personal experiences which is very valuable to your business life.
Max Altschuler uses this book to provide a large variety of tools that you can utilize to maximize your outreach strategy.
Another interesting part of the book is that it applies a very modern method and uses technology that can help you to be more efficient. Finding it difficult? You can follow ‘Sales Hacker’ to get more news and insights about sales in particular.
4. Good To Great (Author: Jim Collins)
Jim Collins is a very famous author that also wrote other notable books like ‘How the Mighty Fail’, ‘Managing the Small to Mid-Sized Company’, ‘Great by Choice’, and ‘Built to Last’ amongst others. This book, ‘Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t’.
The author uses this book to help the readers or business developers solve one key puzzle, “is it possible for a good company to become a great company; if it is, then how?
Jim Collins uses this book to show us the formulas on sound management practices like employing the right workers, targeting the best results, and identifying your key purpose.
Despite being an old book, when you carefully and deeply go through it, you will discover valuable unpredictable forces of failure in firms, like CEO ego, economic change, and others alike.
5. What, Exactly, is Business Development? (Author: Scott Pollack)
Scott Pollack, the CEO, Co-Founder of Firneo, and the writer of the book, ‘what, exactly is business development? aims at exposing everything about business development. If you want to learn more about BD or how to scale through these waters, then you must make sure you have read this book.
It will enlighten you on how the industry works and what to do to take your business to a higher level as a business development expert.
This book has given you the priceless opportunity to learn from a classic experienced BD professional who has been in the business for years.
6. Masters of Networking (Author: Ivan Misner)
One of the most outstanding books of business development is Masters of Networking by a popular businessman and developer, Ivan Misner.
He wrote this book to serve as inspiration to those Business people who find it difficult to connect with other business experts that will grow their business.
A book is a group of information about various kinds of networking with varying instances. However, it focuses more on the primary aspect of networking, otherwise known as mutual benefit.
With this book, you’ll get to understand the basic principles of ‘give and take’. In other words, you mustn’t only focus on what you can give, but also how you can help each other grow.
7. Zero to One (Authors: Peter Thiel & Blake Masters)
In this book, ‘Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Peter Thiel, an investor and entrepreneur reveals to you how to develop new ideas.
He began by arguing against the contrarian premise that this modern period oversees technological stagnation, and smartphones are our major hindrances.
He continued by saying that it’s clear that we’ve experienced notable technological advancement in years past. Therefore, you must try to re-invent new things that can yield better results.
In other words, you wouldn’t necessarily need the next Sergey Brin or Larry Page to develop a new search engine or Bill Gates to develop a new OS. Yes, you can do it.
8. The Greatest Salesman in the World (Author: OG Mandino)
If you are one of those that have some kind of sales-related job, then the above book by OG Mandino is perfect for you.
It is commonly considered the best guide for salesmanship, and with it, you can learn many different techniques on how to build good communication and strategic planning.
Just as its title implies, the greatest salesman in the world is a motivational story that you can derive sales-related ideas and principles smoothly and simply that you can quickly learn from.
9. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if your life depended on it (Author: Chris Voss)
This book gives you an idea of an urgent negotiation. The writer, who was an FBI hostage negotiator wrote this book to take you through his world of negotiating of the highest order, thereby helping you to discover the techniques of understanding the schemes of the negotiators from the other side.
Considering that, with his skills, he discovered common ground and has negotiated past situations involving hostages, it means that there’s certainly a lot you can learn about negotiating a partnership deal and how to address basic conversations.
10. Predictable Prospecting (Author: Marylou Tyler & Jeremy Donovan)
The last but not the list among our top ten business development books are predictable prospecting by Marylou Tyler & Jeremy Donovan, which provides lots of practical ideas. It highlights a whole strategy from A to Z on ways you can craft an efficient outreach approach. It also offers email templates for the immediate test.
With this book, Marylou Tyler and his co-author, Jeremy Donohave, have revealed to every business developer how to approach sales keeping, while also keeping the customer in mind. Therefore, virtually all emails you create go with a stage in the customer journey.
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