Book Review: Selling in Tough Times: Secrets to Selling When No One is Buying, by Tom Hopkins
Certainly timely since we’ve all been facing tough times for the past couple of years, Tom Hopkins’ newest book, Selling in Tough Times: Secrets to Selling When No One is Buying (Business Plus: 2010), seeks to help sellers at all levels get back to the top.
If you’re a Hopkins enthusiast looking for something new, you’ll be disappointed as there is nothing new in the book—but in many ways that’s the point of the book. Hopkins argues that a tough selling environment demands sellers return to the basics of selling. Restating and reinforcing those basics—from prospecting to communication to closing—is the heart and soul of Selling in Tough Times.
Easy to read, the book addresses virtually every aspect of selling, each aspect being addressed in a short one to three page section.
Hopkins spends the first quarter of the book discussing the mental aspects of adjusting to a down market and why selling in a weak market demands you return to the fundamentals of selling. Although many will find the book drags a bit in these early chapters, the book’s format lends itself to skipping those sections that aren’t of interest and focusing on those that you believe are pertinent to your needs.
The second two thirds of the book deals with the various parts of the sale—finding prospects, qualifying them, selling them, servicing them, keeping them. Again, since the book is a series of short treatments of the various points of the sale, you can zero in on those sections of interest to you and ignore the remainder.
If you already have one of Hopkins’ other books such as How to Master the Art of Selling or Selling for Dummies, there’s no need to purchase this one—unless you simply want a concise summation of Hopkins’ teachings. On the other hand, if you’re in a slump or are finding your current market difficult to crack, refocusing on the basics of selling is the place to start and Hopkins lays them out in a straightforward, easy to implement format.
Selling in Tough Times is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, and all fine booksellers.
