Surviving Salespeople isn’t about how wonderful it is to work with salespeople. It’s a self-help guide for identifying and working with the most frustrating salesperson behaviors. By understanding the behaviors that cause the most frustration for marketers and by having tactics in place to anticipate and address those behaviors when encountered, you’ll be better prepared to avoid frustration and get the results you need from sales.

Learn to recognize and successfully deal with the most puzzling and frustrating salesperson behaviors. Surviving Salespeople describes these actions and reactions and outlines how you can anticipate these behaviors, avoid them if possible, address them when they arise, and even use them to gain the upper hand in your working relationships with salespeople.

Most books and articles that discuss the relationship between marketing and sales suggest aligning the two departments in more of a collaborative relationship. However, if you look beyond the team-building platitudes, these books place the bulk of the responsibility in achieving this unity on the shoulders of the marketing team.

This book is different. It doesn’t give you, the marketer, team-building techniques or strategies to improve collaboration between marketing and sales. It doesn’t explain what marketing can do to better support sales efforts. Rather, it’s a practical survival guide for individuals in marketing who need to work with the sales team and still remain both productive and sane.

When listening to this book, you’ll recognize some of the frustrating sales behaviors, although you may not have put a name to them before. Now, you’ll be able to recognize and even anticipate them, and you’ll have strategies to implement. By understanding these behaviors and following the advice in this book, you’ll develop a better relationship with your sales team, save yourself unnecessary work and frustration, and be able to run more successful marketing programs.