Alexander's Reviews > 100 Skills of the Successful Sales Professional: Your Guidebook to Establishing & Elevating Your Career

Needless to say, New York City-based sales expert Alex Dripchak knows of what he speaks. So much so that he is able to communicate it in fresh, witty, and decidedly millennial-friendly and millennial-whispering prose. In this fashion, his new book is titled 100 Skills of the Successful Sales Professional: Your Guidebook to Establishing & Elevating your Career. Dripchak does an effective job of tone balancing, immediately self-deprecating about the generation his age places him in while simultaneously coming across as appropriately brash, irreverent, and concisely informative. “What I’ve done…is take the myriad of best…practices from the most lauded sales geniuses as well as from my experiences in consulting and tech environments and make a different kind of playbook out of it all,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “After reading 27 of the best sales, relationship-building, negotiation, and presentation skill books, I’ve compiled, vetted, and ranked a list of the skills one needs to be successful in finding, developing, and nurturing complex, long-term successful business relationships.” It’s this ability to be appropriately referential and confident in his own, informed abilities that makes Dripchak feel like an uncommonly seasoned guide, despite the experienced professional openly admitting he is still only twenty-nine years old. It’s that kind of youthful enthusiasm but mature articulation that makes 100 Skills of the Successful Sales Professional hit it out of the park on multiple levels. On the one hand, it’s something that is effectively presentational for people of all ages. On the other, it is appealing for the hypothetical young, burgeoning entrepreneur. In an era where the standard young person on a clinical and statistical level describes themselves periodically as feeling ‘overwhelmed’, ‘depressed’, and ‘anxious’, it’s refreshing that someone within their age range has managed to not only achieve considerable success, but has retained relevant communicative ability. The book is never high-handed, nor flippant. It’s that expert balancing of the elements also spelling out the book’s core methodology and messaging, regardless of varying categorical specificity. Successful networking in today’s world essentially is dependent upon a healthy mix of tactical and interpersonally malleable, argues Dripchak. It’s about understanding and respecting ground rules, and in the spirit of said rules fine-tuning and in certain cases refining individual, case-by-case approaches to certain relevant and business-related profiles.

The blend of youthful but never naive communication is what simultaneously differentiates and elevates the read from other leadership advice tomes in the nonfiction sub-genre. It’s a nice change from similar literary accomplishments written by those who have grown accustomed to success over the past few decades…