I've gone for a 'slimmed down' recommendation for what should be on your PreSales bookshelf. In the past few years, there's been an explosion of interest in our profession and consequently, a lot of relevant books written.

Here, I've gone for the PreSales profession standards, 'Demonstrating to Win' by Bob Riefstahl and 'Great Demo' by Peter Cohan. I've included two by John Care; 'The Sales Engineer Manager's Handbook' is a must if you're in a management role (or planning to be).

'Made to Stick' by Chip & Dan Heath is really good on storytelling and how to be memorable. You need at least one 'Challenger' book on your bookshelf; it's probably the only really new sales methodology in the last 20 years or so.

As PreSales is a 'visual' profession, I've included 'slide:ology' by Nancy Duarte, although anything by Nancy, 'resonate', 'illuminate' is all good.

I'm a 'sketch first, turn into a PowerPoint only if you have to' person so I'm giving away a 'trade secret' by including the 'Bikablo 2.0' sketching visual dictionary. If you need inspiration to 'up' your video game then 'The Visual Sale' by Marcus Sheridan and Tyler Lessard will help.

PreSales professionals now also need to master social so I have to include 'The Social Sales Engineer' from my good buddy, Patrick Pissang; it's so good, I wrote the foreword.

Mastering Discovery and Value is absolutely critical to modern B2B selling (which is why we have a workshop dedicated to the skill set and tools needed) so I'm also including Peter Cohan's brand new book 'Doing Discovery'.

And finally, as a profession, we're in the middle of the great transformation to Buyer Enablement so I've included Garin Hess' 'Selling is Hard, Buying is Harder', a must-read.