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.