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Selling in an Anxious World: Driving Sales Success by Crossing the Crevasse from Bad to Good Culture
"Selling in an Anxious World" identifies, characterizes, and aims to fix the leading cause of declining B2B sales—corporate culture! You’ll see the contributing factors leading up to the COVID-19 crisis and the post-crisis opportunity for sellers and their companies to accelerate profitable growth and capture market share.
Selling in an Anxious World provides insight and guidance to drive sales effectiveness, growth, and market share for sellers and modern companies. Today, the organizational culture within companies has become inward focused. The emergence of the gig economy of outsourcing and contracting has depersonalized the workforce. Combined with the shift to an inorganic growth strategy, has become a detriment to being a customer-centric company—causing new levels of risk and anxiety for buyers. B2B sales has become a one way street that has driven customer experience into the ground with sellers taking the fall for it.
In this book you will learn how to:
Become a Client-Centric seller and company
Increase B2B Sales
Implement the best sales effectiveness and sales enablement tools
Identify, characterize and fix the different sales cultures of your company through a diagnostic test
Become a better sales management company
The book combines research from extensive deal reviews, examples from Jim’s personal life, and Bible references to shine a light on culture, presenting an unconventional guide to solving an unconventional problem. You’ll get quick access to whatever topics are important to you, through chapter summaries and reference guides.
Selling in an Anxious World provides insight and guidance to drive sales effectiveness, growth, and market share for sellers and modern companies. Today, the organizational culture within companies has become inward focused. The emergence of the gig economy of outsourcing and contracting has depersonalized the workforce. Combined with the shift to an inorganic growth strategy, has become a detriment to being a customer-centric company—causing new levels of risk and anxiety for buyers. B2B sales has become a one way street that has driven customer experience into the ground with sellers taking the fall for it.
In this book you will learn how to:
Become a Client-Centric seller and company
Increase B2B Sales
Implement the best sales effectiveness and sales enablement tools
Identify, characterize and fix the different sales cultures of your company through a diagnostic test
Become a better sales management company
The book combines research from extensive deal reviews, examples from Jim’s personal life, and Bible references to shine a light on culture, presenting an unconventional guide to solving an unconventional problem. You’ll get quick access to whatever topics are important to you, through chapter summaries and reference guides.
230 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2020
2 people are currently reading
9 people want to read
About the author
Jim Holden
25 books2 followersJim Holden founded Holden International in 1979, and throughout its almost 30-year history, Holden has grown to be a world-renowned leader in the sales process improvement field.
Mr. Holden's career has been marked by exceptional innovation. In 1990, he established Holden as the first company to model sales effectiveness, an achievement that garnered the Regional Entrepreneur of the Year award for the Service Industry.
Mr. Holden is also a globally recognized business author, with titles including Power Base® Selling, World Class Selling, The Selling Fox, The New Power Base Selling, and just released, Selling in an Anxious World, available on Kindle and hybrid paperback (a cross between hardcover and softcover).
Mr. Holden earned a B.S.E.E. with high honors from Northeastern University in Boston and is a member of the National Engineering Honor Society, Tau Beta Pi, and the National Interdisciplinary Honor Society, Phi Kappa Phi. He began his sales career in 1974 with Teradyne, a Boston-based high-technology company. Prior to founding Holden, he was Vice President of Sales for Aegis, a third-party distribution company selling computer-based test systems into the manufacturing environment.
Mr. Holden and his wife Chris reside in the greater Chicago area. He was a founder/director of the First National Bank of Roselle and has served as a director of two other area banks and several early development-stage companies. He is active in the community, having founded the Partnership to End Homelessness in Chicago, and is a supporter of many other charities, including cancer research.
Mr. Holden's career has been marked by exceptional innovation. In 1990, he established Holden as the first company to model sales effectiveness, an achievement that garnered the Regional Entrepreneur of the Year award for the Service Industry.
Mr. Holden is also a globally recognized business author, with titles including Power Base® Selling, World Class Selling, The Selling Fox, The New Power Base Selling, and just released, Selling in an Anxious World, available on Kindle and hybrid paperback (a cross between hardcover and softcover).
Mr. Holden earned a B.S.E.E. with high honors from Northeastern University in Boston and is a member of the National Engineering Honor Society, Tau Beta Pi, and the National Interdisciplinary Honor Society, Phi Kappa Phi. He began his sales career in 1974 with Teradyne, a Boston-based high-technology company. Prior to founding Holden, he was Vice President of Sales for Aegis, a third-party distribution company selling computer-based test systems into the manufacturing environment.
Mr. Holden and his wife Chris reside in the greater Chicago area. He was a founder/director of the First National Bank of Roselle and has served as a director of two other area banks and several early development-stage companies. He is active in the community, having founded the Partnership to End Homelessness in Chicago, and is a supporter of many other charities, including cancer research.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 23, 2025
This is a passion project, right? This is something that you write during some "down time" in your office; something you type away at to look busy and "concretize" your "leadership style". Then you skip out on a editor, because that will increase your COGS and affect your IRR in an anti-positive manner. At least, I hope no one got paid to edit it.
Ideas wander. Concepts appear, vanish, then reappear pages later wearing fake mustaches. The book is too weighed down by its own jargon to ever truly take flight and let its ideas travel with you and be put to good use. No, they're stuck on the page forever.
Then comes the so-called Quick Reference Guide, which is where things cross from merely sloppy into darkly comic. This is supposed to be the calm, distilled essence of the book—the emergency exit. Instead, it reads like notes taken during a power outage by someone who had already skimmed the text and decided not to ask questions. The language is just as foggy, the advice just as elusive, only now compressed into a form that somehow makes less sense per square inch.
That last paragraph was written by AI, which seems about right.
Ideas wander. Concepts appear, vanish, then reappear pages later wearing fake mustaches. The book is too weighed down by its own jargon to ever truly take flight and let its ideas travel with you and be put to good use. No, they're stuck on the page forever.
Then comes the so-called Quick Reference Guide, which is where things cross from merely sloppy into darkly comic. This is supposed to be the calm, distilled essence of the book—the emergency exit. Instead, it reads like notes taken during a power outage by someone who had already skimmed the text and decided not to ask questions. The language is just as foggy, the advice just as elusive, only now compressed into a form that somehow makes less sense per square inch.
That last paragraph was written by AI, which seems about right.
May 27, 2021
A 10 hour drive around the block. Big on philosophical ideas but lacking connection to the day to day of sales and execution required in modern roles or any immediate action items that can be attempted quickly.
December 28, 2023
Insightful
This book is very insightful, and helped me benchmark my current situation. A must read for today’s sales community. I recommend it! Happy reading if you already bought it. :)
This book is very insightful, and helped me benchmark my current situation. A must read for today’s sales community. I recommend it! Happy reading if you already bought it. :)
June 7, 2023
Disappointing. Old news. Somewhat off balance.
December 1, 2021
Was useful then devolved into the standard "old white guy thinks everything used to be good until these young kids with their radical ideas showed up".
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews