Rating: 
Summary: Understand Your Sales Career - Know which job to pursue
Review: I will first tell you that I have read thousands of books over the course of my life, many were books on business and sales. This is the first time that I have ever felt compelled to write a review. Also this is the first time I ever read a business book and then felt disappointed when the book was over, I would normally feel that way at the end of a particularly good novel.
I'll just have to go and buy all the other books in the series.The information imparted by "Discovering Your Sales Strengths" has had a profound impact on me. Undoubtedly many salespeople that read the book will suddenly understand their own career a whole lot better. And hopefully this will be the beginning of the end of unenlightened and just plain dumb sales management. This book has also greatly improved my overall confidence. I will probably be changing jobs later this year and I'll actually really know what kinds of jobs to aggressively pursue.
Rating:
Summary: Good book for developing salesmanship
Review: I would recommend this book along with the Sales Bible as books that can help you to transform you sales career. I run a very successful business buying and selling on ebay and this book contains a lot of techniques that will help you develop the characteristics you will need to succeed in sales.
Rating: 
Summary: Where's the beef?
Review: I've read the entire Gallup series of strengths books hoping to learn the secret--What characteristics should we look for when hiring? These books keep tantalizing us with references to the many studies Gallup has done for large corporations to help them hire more successfully. But nowhere do they give us the real meat of these studies. Instead they dance around it and make us wonder why we just spent our valuable time and money reading a couched advertisement for their services. Nevertheless, the 12 good management points (Q12) do offer an excellent reference tool for a manager who wants to provide improved employee morale and productivity. Please, Gallup, give us the "12 points" for hiring various positions in organizations. Don't keep it a secret.
Rating: 
Summary: Superb book for the sales professional
Review: Most self-help books for the sales field try to pump you up with motivational quotes and stories and give you standard steps to success. This is the first self-help sales book that really made sense. It is based on very solid research but is written in a pleasant and easy to understand manner. I will definitely be re-reading it in more depth.
I still would have liked to read more real-life example stories and had more data on what kind of talent combinations tend to correlate with the highest levels of performance in the most common sales roles.
One point they did not emphasize enough is that it is not so much the dominant talents that you have, but how you actively apply and adapt them to your job. Two people with very different dominant talent themes can sometimes succeed equally well by applying their unique strengths and managing their weaknesses. Also, it is possible to overwhelm a weakness with a particular strength to make it irrelevant.
Rating:
Summary: Strengths & Sales = Gallup Delivers
Review: Once again the Gallup organization, specifically Benson Smith and Tony Ruttigliano, deliver a good usable book to help improve your career based on strengths. This book begins with Gallup's common message, based on research, that if you focus on what you are good at; you will get better at it. This book continues on showing you what makes up a these strengths, based on a combination of talents which cluster together and come out as things like Competition, Empathy, and Command. This book will allow you to focus more on how you are wired, and what you have, than what you do not, and will never have. Most importantly this book gives you access to your 'Top Five' strengths, or patterns for success. These strengths, ranging from Harmony to Woo, will show you how you alone are as unique as 1 in 30 million people. The book could have been 5 stars if Gallup would have provided more patterns of strength and how they work in sales careers, they only give you a few morsels from their vault of knowledge and what patterns and combinations of strengths work in sales. They do let you in on the fact that Competition, Command and Empathy were themes commonly found in successful sales-agents. Overall this book is an A-, another great work from Gallup based on research, not just theory. Joseph Dworak
Rating: 
Summary: Don't buy eBook version of Discover your Sales Strengths
Review: The eBook version does NOT come with the ID Code that is necessary in order to take their online strength assessment survey and associated reporting that ties directly into the books usefulness. I am told from their customer service that they internally decided to NOT include the strength assessment with the eBook version and instead only provide it to the audio and hardcopy versions. They tell me the only way to be able to take the strengths assessment survey is to re-purchased the hardcopy or audio version. Too bad they don't make their internal decision publicly available before people buy the eBook version.
Rating:
Summary: Practical guide to high performance in sales
Review: This book is part of a series of books by Gallup centering around the idea that to flourish in you work you need to identify, use and develop you strengths (instead of focusing on your weaknesses). The first extensive articulation of this research-based view by Gallup was in the book 'Now, discover your strengths' by Buckingham and Clifton (2001; see my review of that book on amazon). This book is the application of that idea to the field of sales. It is easy to read and practical and very recommendable for both sales people and their managers. Coert Visser, m-cc.nl
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