9 Non-Sales Books Every Salesperson Should Read

A thread on r/salestechniques asked a simple question: which books made you better at sales even though they aren’t sales books? The answers were more interesting than any “top 10 sales books” list, because nobody recommended another book about closing techniques.

That makes sense. Most of what makes selling hard has nothing to do with the pitch. It’s getting rejected forty times before lunch and still making call forty-one. It’s doing the boring prospecting work on a Tuesday when nobody’s watching. It’s a lumpy commission check that ruins your month. It’s a buyer who doesn’t care about your features because switching costs them more than staying put.

Here are nine books from that thread, what each one is about, what it teaches a salesperson, a talk from the author, and one thing to try this week.

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Pick your book by problem

Not sure where to start? Find the line that sounds like you.

If this sounds like you…	Start with
“Rejection is grinding me down”	Can’t Hurt Me
“I start strong every quarter, then fade”	Atomic Habits
“I keep blaming myself for things outside my control”	The Mountain Is You
“My commission swings are stressing me out”	The Psychology of Money
“I can’t explain why a customer should switch to us”	7 Powers
“I’m new and doubt whether I belong here”	Shoe Dog
“I’m moving into leadership”	The Hard Thing About Hard Things
“I’m juggling career and family and dropping balls”	My Life in Full
“I want to read people and tell stories better”	Mother Mary Comes to Me

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1. Can’t Hurt Me — David Goggins

What it’s about: Goggins grew up with an abusive father, poverty, and racism, and was overweight and working as an exterminator in his twenties. He went on to become a Navy SEAL, an Army Ranger, and an ultramarathoner. The book is his story plus a set of mental “challenges” at the end of each chapter.

What it teaches a salesperson:

• The 40% rule. When your mind says you’re done, you’re about 40% of the way to your actual limit. Useful at 4pm when you “can’t” make another dial.
• The cookie jar. Keep a list of hard things you’ve already survived. Pull from it before a tough call. Your last big close counts.
• The accountability mirror. Write the honest truth about your pipeline on a sticky note. Not the forecast you give your manager. The real one.

Watch Goggins talk about it:

Try this week: build your cookie jar

Open a note on your phone. Write down five hard wins from the last two years: a deal you saved, an objection you turned around, a quarter you hit after a terrible start. Before your next cold-call block, read it. That’s the whole drill. It feels silly for about two days, then it starts working.

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2. Shoe Dog — Phil Knight

What it’s about: Nike’s founder tells the story of the company’s first 18 years, from importing Japanese running shoes and selling them out of his car to a near-bankruptcy that kept going for years. It reads like a novel.

What it teaches a salesperson:

• Belief sells. Knight tried selling encyclopedias and hated it. Shoes were different because he believed in running. If you don’t believe in what you sell, buyers can tell.
• Cash flow is survival. Nike was growing fast and almost died because the bank wouldn’t extend credit. Revenue that shows up late can kill a business, which is worth remembering when you negotiate payment terms.
• Relationships are the moat. Almost every crisis in the book is solved by someone who trusts Knight personally.

Watch Knight talk about it:

Try this week: the belief test

Write down three reasons you’d buy your own product if you were the customer. Not the reasons in the pitch deck. Your reasons. If you get stuck after one, go talk to your happiest customer and ask them why they stayed. Use their words on your next call.

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3. My Life in Full — Indra Nooyi

What it’s about: The former PepsiCo CEO (2006–2018) on growing up in Chennai, moving to the US, climbing through a corporate world that wasn’t built for her, and running one of the biggest companies on earth while raising two daughters. The second half argues that workplaces need to change for families.

What it teaches a salesperson:

• Do the homework nobody else does. Nooyi was known for over-preparing for every meeting. Showing up knowing the buyer’s business better than their own team is a real edge.
• Say thank you to the people behind the people. As CEO she wrote letters to the parents of her senior executives thanking them for raising their kids. Think about who’s behind your champion: their assistant, their team, their boss.
• “Leave the crown in the garage.” When she was named president of PepsiCo, her mother sent her out to buy milk. Titles don’t matter at home, and they shouldn’t matter on a discovery call either.

Watch Nooyi talk about it:

Try this week: the one-page brief

Before your next big meeting, write a one-page brief on the account: their last earnings or funding news, the top three priorities their leadership talks about publicly, and who in the room reports to whom. Takes 30 minutes. Most reps skip it, which is exactly why it works.

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4. 7 Powers — Hamilton Helmer

What it’s about: A short, dense strategy book. Helmer argues that a business only earns lasting profits if it has one of seven “powers”: scale economies, network economies, counter-positioning, switching costs, branding, cornered resource, or process power. Each one needs both a benefit and a barrier that stops competitors from copying it.

What it teaches a salesperson:

• Why customers don’t switch. Switching costs are a power. If you’re selling against an incumbent, that’s the wall you’re up against, and “our product is better” doesn’t get over it. Your pitch has to lower the cost of switching.
• Counter-positioning is a sales story. When your business model is one the incumbent can’t copy without hurting itself (think Netflix vs. Blockbuster late fees), that’s your strongest talk track.
• Talk to executives in their language. CFOs and CEOs think in moats. If you can explain how your product strengthens theirs, you’re in a different conversation.

Watch Helmer talk about it:

Try this week: map your competitor's power

Pick the competitor you lose to most. Which of the seven powers do they have with your prospects? Usually it’s switching costs or branding. Then write one sentence on how you reduce it: a migration service, a pilot, an integration with their existing tool. That sentence goes into your next competitive deal.

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5. The Mountain Is You — Brianna Wiest

What it’s about: A book about self-sabotage. Wiest’s argument is that when you keep getting in your own way, it’s usually because the sabotaging behaviour is meeting some need you haven’t admitted to, like avoiding the fear of failing for real.

What it teaches a salesperson:

• Call reluctance is self-sabotage. Spending an hour “researching” a prospect you could call right now is a way to avoid rejection. Naming it takes most of its power away.
• Small shifts beat big resolutions. Wiest pushes for tiny daily changes over dramatic reinventions. That fits sales, where results come from repetition.
• Your comfort zone has a ceiling. Some reps quietly stop growing at the income they’re comfortable with. Worth asking whether that’s you.

Watch Wiest talk about it:

Try this week: catch the stall

Each time you notice yourself doing something other than the task you know matters most (tweaking a template, reorganizing the CRM, re-researching an account), write down what you were avoiding. At the end of the week, look at the list. The pattern is usually obvious.

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6. Atomic Habits — James Clear

What it’s about: How small habits compound. Clear’s four laws: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. He also argues that lasting change comes from identity (“I’m someone who prospects every morning”) rather than goals (“I want to hit quota”).

What it teaches a salesperson:

• Systems beat quotas. Everyone on your team has the same number. The ones who hit it have a system that runs whether they feel like it or not.
• The two-minute rule. Too tired to prospect? Commit to one email. You’ll usually send ten.
• Habit stacking. “After I pour my first coffee, I open my call list.” Attach the new habit to one you already have.

Watch Clear talk about it:

Try this week: stack one prospecting habit

Fill in the blank: “After I ________, I will send three prospecting emails.” Pick something you already do every workday without fail. Track it on paper with an X for each day. Don’t break the chain for five days.

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7. The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel

What it’s about: Twenty short chapters on why people make strange decisions about money. Housel’s point is that doing well with money depends more on behaviour than on intelligence.

What it teaches a salesperson:

• Commission income needs room for error. A great quarter followed by a dry one is normal in sales. Housel’s advice is to plan for the bad stretch and save more than seems necessary, so a slow month doesn’t push you into desperate selling.
• Your buyers aren’t rational either. They’re reasonable. They buy for safety, status, and to avoid blame, not because your ROI spreadsheet is airtight.
• Enough is a number. Knowing what you actually need takes a lot of pressure off every deal.

Watch Housel talk about it:

Try this week: set your floor

Add up your fixed monthly costs. Compare them to your base salary alone, with no commission. If base doesn’t cover them, you’re selling with a gun to your head, and buyers can feel it. Make a plan to close that gap, even if it takes a year.

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8. Mother Mary Comes to Me — Arundhati Roy

What it’s about: Roy’s 2025 memoir about her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and difficult woman who founded a school in Kerala and won a landmark case for inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women in India. It’s a book about loving someone who is very hard to deal with.

What it teaches a salesperson: This is the least obvious pick on the list, and maybe the most useful for senior reps.

• Difficult people are rarely simple. Roy’s mother was brilliant and cruel, generous and impossible. Your toughest buyer probably is too. Understanding what drives them beats labelling them “difficult.”
• Precise language matters. Roy writes with no filler. Reading her will make your emails shorter.
• Stories stick, features don’t. The book is a reminder of how much a single specific scene can carry. One real customer story does more than ten bullet points.

Watch Roy talk about it:

Try this week: rewrite one email

Take your best-performing cold email and cut it in half without losing the point. Then replace your strongest feature claim with one sentence about a specific customer and what changed for them. Send both versions and compare replies.

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9. The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz

What it’s about: Horowitz co-founded Loudcloud, nearly lost it in the dot-com crash, turned it into Opsware, and sold it to HP for $1.6 billion in 2007. The book is about the parts of running a company that management books skip: layoffs, firing friends, and what he calls “the Struggle.”

What it teaches a salesperson:

• There’s no silver bullet, only lead bullets. When you’re losing to a competitor, there’s no clever trick. You have to do the hard, unglamorous work of being better.
• Wartime vs. peacetime. Some quarters you’re in growth mode; some you’re fighting to survive. Know which one you’re in and act accordingly.
• Hiring and managing salespeople. If you’re heading toward sales leadership, his chapters on hiring executives and running one-on-ones are worth the price of the book.

Watch Horowitz talk about it:

Try this week: find your lead bullet

List the last three deals you lost. For each one, write the real reason, not the one in the CRM. If the same reason shows up twice, that’s the thing to fix. It’ll be boring. Fix it anyway.

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Quick self-check

Test what stuck. Click to reveal each answer.

What's Goggins' "40% rule"?

When your mind tells you you’re finished, you’ve only used about 40% of what you’ve got.

Name three of Helmer's seven powers.

Any three of: scale economies, network economies, counter-positioning, switching costs, branding, cornered resource, process power.

What are Clear's four laws of behaviour change?

Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying.

According to Horowitz, what beats a silver bullet?

Lead bullets: the hard, unglamorous work of actually getting better.

Why does Housel say commission earners need "room for error"?

Income that swings means a bad stretch is guaranteed. Planning for it keeps you from selling out of desperation.

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How to actually read these

You won’t read all nine this quarter, and you don’t need to. Pick one from the table at the top, read it, and do its exercise for a week. Then pick the next one.

And if a book on this list isn’t landing, drop it. The best non-sales book for you is the one that fixes the problem you have right now.