Snap Selling. Speed up sales and win new business with today’s frazzled customers. Jill Konrath. 2010 ISBN 978159184330.  Okay, along with Sales Dirty Secret, this new book by Jill Konrath (Selling to Big Companies) is my top sales book for 2010.  Jill has assimilated the best practices of current practitioner including Sharon Drew Morgen‘s ground breaking insights into what happens when interested and “hot”  clients “disappear” for long periods of time.  Jill’s book has been flagged by more postit notes  more than any book I read this year.  Immediately useful to any working sales person, it is a book that gives you, the sales pro,  a lifetime of application advice. Her discussions as to how frazzled customers are today is bang on.  Lesson learned she advocates that you will need at least 10 contact attempts over six to eight weeks to be noticed. No worry about being a pest since the targets are so busy, they will not notice the frequency of your attempts amongst the fire hose of incoming requests.  Early on she states,  “if you are not helping a customer with a high priority item, nothing is going to happen. How does your offering add value to their business? “.   |Also she states that consultative/solution selling, which I consider to be level four (90s style), is well past its time. You will not have the time in front of clients early on the be “consultative” . Jill is the first current writer to begin to address what I consider level five (Gen five) selling , where the seller needs an integrated sales and marketing effort in order to get noticed, because today’s sales cycle involves so many more skills.  If you think that your sales team needs to “get back to basics” , in order to increase sales, that indicates faulty reasoning on your parts. In our engagements, marketing is takes over  “the basics” freeing the sales team to address today’s harder issues.  Well written, well organized, concise with great examples and suggestion sI recommend every sales person and sales manager read this book this year, well before they miss their quotas.

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