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Among the disciplines that make up the field of management, sales rarely gets the respect it deserves. If a business does a perfect job of designing its products and services, the theory goes, who needs salespeople? As Peter Drucker wrote: “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous . . . to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

In fact, as the essays in this collection make clear, selling remains a vital function in the vast majority of companies. Technology has made many products more complicated, creating the need for salespeople to educate consumers on their uses. In the B2B world, the shift to services has created a move away from simple transactional relationships between buyers and sellers; instead, companies need to nurture long-lasting relationships with customers, with salespeople often serving critical roles as stewards of those relationships. Feedback gathered by salespeople can serve as a powerful engine of innovation. And as anyone who’s worked in a corporate setting near the end of a quarter knows, salespeople remain the key to the revenue growth that’s so important to many managers and investors. While there will always be a select group of simple products that “sell themselves,” in many industries, good salespeople remain a big determinant of company performance.

So how do you effectively recruit, train, manage, and support these key employees? How do you use smart pricing, promotions, and incentives to make them more successful? And how should salespeople attack the daily tasks of their profession, from planning a sales call to handling a potential customer’s toughest questions?

These questions—and many more—are addressed in the essays that follow, which began as a series of blog posts on HBR.org, the website of Harvard Business Review.

While both physical and virtual bookstores abound with volumes of sales advice, this collection offers two distinct advantages. First, unlike single-author works, this collection features a variety of viewpoints by writers with diverse expertise. Second, unlike sales advice drawn primarily from hard-won experience, many of these essays draw on rigorous quantitative research into what really works (and what doesn’t), done by researchers at some of the world’s best universities and sales consultancies.

More than most workers, salespeople perform in a field where success is easily judged: How much did you sell today, this week, or this quarter? In that pursuit, we hope that HBR’s authors and the advice in How to Sell More offer valuable tools to drive success.

—THE EDITORS