Selling, goals and getting things done
Made a career of turning sales and personal productivity into simple, repeatable, teachable steps.
Photograph: Daniel Wikberg · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Tracy has written a very large number of books and delivered training for decades, mostly on sales, goal-setting and time management. The material is not original in the academic sense and it is not trying to be — the value is in how systematically it is broken down for someone who has to go and do it tomorrow.
His best-known single idea is Eat That Frog: do the biggest, most important and most avoided task first, because everything else is easier afterwards and because avoidance compounds.
He treats selling as a learnable process with stages rather than as a personality trait. For anyone who believes they 'cannot sell', that reframe is the whole unlock.
Identify the one task you are most likely to avoid and do it first. Simple, unfashionable and effective, particularly for owners whose avoided task is usually chasing money or a difficult conversation.
Prospecting, building trust, identifying needs, presenting, handling objections, closing, following up. Each stage can be practised separately, which is what makes it teachable.
His long-running insistence on written, dated, specific goals reviewed regularly. It is close to SMART and it predates most of the corporate versions.
These links go to their own work. We summarise and point — we do not republish it.
Anyone who has to sell and does not enjoy it, and anyone whose problem is starting rather than knowing.
Repetitive across the catalogue and light on evidence. One book covers most of it; twenty do not add twenty times as much.