Sales isn't about pushing products or being efficient; it's about building the right systems to manage and empower your salespeople.

If you read nothing else on sales, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review; articles and selected the most important ones to help you understand how to create the conditions for sales success.

This book will inspire you to:

• Understand your customer's buying center
• Integrate your sales and marketing operations
• Assess your business cycle and its impact on your sales force
• Transition away from solution sales
• Leverage the power of micromarkets
• Introduce tiebreaker selling and consensus selling
• Motivate your sales force properly

This collection of articles includes: Major Sales: Who Really Does the Buying, by Thomas V. Bonoma; Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing, by Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, and Suj Krishnaswamy; Match Your Sales Force Structure to Your Business Life Cycle, by Andris A. Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha, and Sally E. Lorimer; The End of Solution Sales, by Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman; Selling into Micromarkets, by Manish Goyal, Maryanne Q. Hancock, and Homayoun Hatami; Dismantling the Sales Machine, by Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman; Tiebreaker Selling, by James C. Anderson, James A. Narus, and Marc Wouters; Making the Consensus Sale, by Karl Schmidt, Brent Adamson, and Anna Bird; The Right Way to Use Compensation, by Mark Roberge; How to Really Motivate Salespeople, by Doug J. Chung; and Getting Beyond 'Show Me the Money,' an interview with Andris Zoltners by Daniel McGinn.