Jeffrey Gitomer

Jeffrey Gitomer is an American sales trainer, speaker, and author whose books are among the most widely read in their category, and whose delivery is loud enough that a substantial number of readers cannot get past it.

He was born in New Jersey in 1946 and worked in sales and business for decades before turning to training and writing. His syndicated column Sales Moves ran in business journals across the United States, and he has delivered a very large number of seminars for corporate clients.

The Little Red Book of Selling, published in 2004, is his best-known work and is built around twelve and a half principles of what he calls sales greatness. The half is a joke and it is also a signal about the register of the whole book, which is deliberately unserious about a subject most people find excruciating.

Its central line does the work: people do not like to be sold, but they love to buy. That reframes the job from persuasion, which is adversarial and which everybody can feel happening to them, to the removal of whatever stands between somebody and a thing they already want. The practical consequences run through the rest of the book, particularly the material on referrals, where his position is that referrals come from doing work worth talking about and then asking, and that most people do neither.

He has published a sequence of color-coded companion volumes on networking, attitude, customer satisfaction, and social media, and runs training and certification programs. His personal branding material dates the books, since the specifics belong to a pre-social media landscape, though the principle underneath survives translation.