SOURCES

Front matter and chapter 3

• Gartner. “Buyer Enablement: Win More B2B Sales Deals,” 2018, citing the Gartner 2017 Digital B2B Buyer Survey (n = 750). Also the source of the 5% to 6% estimate and the six-to-ten buying group. Gartner no longer hosts the paper; read in a third-party copy.
• Gartner. “Gartner Sales Survey Finds 61% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Buying Experience.” Press release, June 25, 2025. Survey of 632 B2B buyers, August to September 2024.
• Gartner. “Gartner Sales Survey Finds 67% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Experience.” Press release, March 9, 2026. Survey of 646 B2B buyers, August to September 2025.

Chapter 2

• Advertising Hall of Fame. John E. Kennedy, inductee profile. Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz, The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker, Harvard Business Review Press, 2010.
• Claude C. Hopkins. Scientific Advertising, 1923. Chapter 2, “Just Salesmanship.” Public-domain text.
• David Ogilvy. The Theory and Practice of Selling the AGA Cooker, June 1935. Text. On Fortune’s view of the manual: Los Angeles Times obituary, July 22, 1999, as cited in Wikipedia’s biography.
• Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham and Suj Krishnaswamy. “Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing.” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2006.

Chapters 4 to 6

• Neil Rackham. SPIN Selling. McGraw-Hill, 1988. Research scope from the publisher’s description; Huthwaite International, “The SPIN Methodology”.
• Gong. “Keys to Winning Sales Conversations,” April 2017, and “Mastering the talk-to-listen ratio in sales calls,” 2025. Vendor data.
• Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. The Challenger Sale. Portfolio, 2011. CEB, press release, November 14, 2011; Challenger Inc., “What is the Challenger Sales Methodology?”
• Noel Capon. “Revisiting The Challenger Sale: ‘Breakthrough’ Built on a Flimsy Foundation.” Velocity 17, January 2015.
• Adam Rapp, Daniel G. Bachrach, Nikolaos Panagopoulos and Jessica Ogilvie. “Salespeople as knowledge brokers: a review and critique of the challenger sales model.” Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management 34(4), 2014.
• James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads.” Harvard Business Review, March 2011.

Chapters 7 and 8

• California Penal Code section 632. Text. 18 U.S.C. section 2511(2)(d). Text. Justia, “Recording Phone Calls and Conversations: 50-State Survey,” last reviewed September 2024.
• Abbie Griffin and John R. Hauser. “The Voice of the Customer.” Marketing Science 12(1), 1993.
• The Vita Coco Company, Inc. Form S-1 registration statement, filed September 27, 2021, including the founder’s letter.
• Daniel J. O’Keefe. “How to Handle Opposing Arguments in Persuasive Messages: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Effects of One-Sided and Two-Sided Messages.” Communication Yearbook 22, 1999.
• Robert B. Cialdini. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. 1984.
• Gerd Bohner and Lena E. Schlüter. “A Room with a Viewpoint Revisited: Descriptive Norms and Hotel Guests’ Towel Reuse Behavior.” PLOS ONE, 2014. The original study: Noah J. Goldstein, Robert B. Cialdini and Vladas Griskevicius, Journal of Consumer Research 35(3), 2008.

Chapters 9 and 10

• Byron Sharp. How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know. Oxford University Press, 2010. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, “How do you measure How Brands Grow?”
• YETI Holdings, Inc. Form S-1 registration statement, filed September 27, 2018.
• Loren Steffy. “The Rise of Yeti Coolers.” Texas Monthly, December 2016.

Chapters 11 and 12, and Appendix B

• Walmart. Open Call FAQs, and “Walmart Highlights U.S. Manufacturing and Small Business Growth at 2025 Open Call,” October 9, 2025.
• Kim-Mai Cutler. “Lessons From A Study of Perfect Pitch Decks: VCs Spend An Average of 3 Minutes, 44 Seconds On Them.” TechCrunch, June 8, 2015. DocSend data; vendor data.
• Federal Trade Commission. “CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business,” edited January 2024.