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The Now Revolution. 7 Shifts to make your business faster, smarter, and more social. Jay Baer & Amber Naslund.  2011. ISBN 9780470923276.  This book has been sitting waiting for me to get to it and I am glad I finally did.  It is a mix of an analysis of what the world is like now plus some serious do it now tips.  Some key takeaways:

• The transition from 50 to 100 employees has big impacts on holding onto the company culture
• If your company is not already “social” in its culture you will have a reduced chance of success in the social media space.
• There are quickly changing requirements for the talent you need in your company, what worked before will not work now in your hiring process.
• You need an army to use social media – starting with a heavy emphasis on customer service, and empowering many many employees to contribute to your social media initiatives.
• You need to use a new telephone to listen for buyer, customer, competitor  and employee “keywords” .
• How you respond to this challenge and how you measure results requires some serious analysis – its not  something you hand off to an intern.

Very cool use of QR/ tagging codes in the book, making it more interactive.  Check it out at nowrevolutionbook.com. As ever, some of the Microsoft stuff does not play nice with Android, ie when they send you to a document and not a webpage.

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The End of Business as Usual. Brian Solis.  2012. ISBN 9781118171561.   This is the epitome of a very current marketing academic book that is eminently practical.  This does not make it an easy read because Brian is concise and direct in his analysis and expects the reader to do some work as well.  The book is full of aha moments, and my Kindle highlights are legion.  This is the book for you if you are a current practicing marketer and or academic.  I especially appreciated that Brian was able to skillfully weave the entire marketing skill set into all aspects of the company.   If you want to learn and earn in this space, you will need to read this book.  Full disclosure- I bought this book and it is on all my Kindles.   Check out his terrific blog http://www.briansolis.com/

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The first three parts of this series  have talked about the shift required in selling  today due to buyers having the power to decide when they will interact with you.  I also talked about the work that marketing and sales have to do to get ready to sell on value not price. This part discusses some of the training that has worked to change habits and beliefs.

In our training implementations we use short role playing (recorded) as part of the regular sales meetings. Each play has a short focus topic which is aligned with new or updated supporting assets.  Very quickly we find no lack of sales volunteers/commentators to play out and critique the
roles (sales people are so shy). Humor is important here.

Having the session recorded allows the client to build up a sales training library /resource for those who want to review on their own time. (This helps the salesperson who is on the road and misses a meeting)  The role playing goal is to clearly indicate the gap between preferred and poor approaches.  Some of popular topics have been:

• Buyers lie and other tales for sales virgins (discounting/negotiation)
• Beware the premature proposal, practise safe selling (discounting/knowledge)
• What buyers really mean when they say, “Your price is too high.” (negotiation)
• How buyers go to school on you. (negotiation)
• Fight the urge to broadcast in presentations, we are not the BBC (Communication skills)
• Do you deserve to take the meeting? (Knowledge of the customer)
• The customer does not care about you and that’s a good thing (Value and results)

The organization needs to be focussed on value not volume for this change to work.  If value selling is  new to the company, your market may have been trained to respond to pricing (allowing your product to be commoditized). Fixing this is a separate topic which others have addressed. (Nagle et al)

There is more information on pricing and value in the following series of posts.

Leverage Point

What can you do about pricing for value ?

The intent in this series was to give the reader a different  POV  showing a way out of the declining returns from push marketing and selling. By looking  first at the buyers process and meeting their needs all through in the process, marketing and sales teams are better positioning your company for higher profits and shorter sales cycles.  By adopting this approach a company is also setting themselves up as being different from the others in the  marketplace.  This also adds to your competitive position.

My warning is that this takes hard thoughtful work and attention to the details in execution.  Doing this poorly will leave you worse off than not doing it all.  Doing this well will just make you all very wealthy.

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The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing. 2nd ed.  How to trigger exponential sales through runaway word of mouth. George Silverman.2011. ISBN 9780814416686.  This book is full of extremely current material applicable to content marketing. Silverman “invented”  WoM marketing and has been at it  longer than anyone.  His idea of impact is to shorten buying decision times.
He has the stories and ideas to prove it.   Some tidbits:

1. In a believability ranking ( from 1 -21)  , a statement from a trusted adviser  ranked 1, whereas a company president giving an sales  infomercial,  ranked 18.
2. Make your message simple – so its easy to deliver
3. Make the client decisions easy
4. Use real people and real stories
5. How easy is your referral system?
6. Customer service is part of marketing
7. Are you creating raving fans?
8. When in doubt ask , what would Google or Apple do?

This is a must buy for any marketer.  Its your step by step guide to success.

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The No Asshole Rule. Building a civilized workplace and surviving one that isn’t. Robert J. Sutton. 2007. ISBN 9780759518018. This is so funny and true that it hurt to read it.  I could have used this a few times in my work life – one of the reasons I went into consulting was gaining the ability to chose who I work with – never regretted it.   Guy Kawasaki posted an online survey to self diagnose how much of an asshole you are .  This book is required reading if you work in a tech company.  Well written, clear prose that makes your day better!

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How to Market to People Not Like You.  Know it or blow it rules for reaching diverse customers. Kelly McDonald. 2011. ISBN 9780470879009.  Right out of the gate Kelly makes a statement I really know is true all about the reduced power of demographic marketing.  She goes on:

• The difference between a 30 yr old unmarried career gal and a 30 yr old suburban mom creates a huge disconnect for traditional marketers.
• You need to market to peoples’ values. We spend money on things we care about.  (I thought of the 25 yr old single stockbroker, vegan, who jogs and uses an iphone to catch up to his friends on facebook.)
• You can market to groups  (First time latino home buyers have different needs  from first time caucasian home buyers)
• People willingly pay a premium for what they truly want.  ( $2500 for a pair of Stanley Cup tickets!)
• How do you make your customer feel?
• How do you fit in with their lifestyle? ( I thought of the young couple redoing their kitchen. To go “appliance shopping” requires a babysitter, getting organized and then the store is almost closing when they get there. )

This is a useful book for any marketer looking at diverse markets. She gives enough examples for so many groups that you get the picture immediately. Initially you think this is a B2C focus, but B2B can learn lots too.  After all you are still selling to individual buyers.  Clearly written and insightful. If you market – get this one. Her website.

• Book Review: How to Market to People Not Like You (salesandmanagementblog.com)
• What the Rise of Univision Means for Your Brand (fastcompany.com)
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Launch. How to quickly propel your business beyond the competition. Michael Stelzner. 2011. ISBN 9781118027233.  Wow.

So much packed into a reasonable read.

1. How Stelzner built and drove to incredible success two completely different web businesses. White papers (http://www.stelzner.com/copy-HowTo-whitepapers.php)  and social media (socialmediaexaminer.com )  From that comes online events, research papers, books and deep valuable content.
2. More than a how to do it, he also shows you why things work, the details on how to build great content, and simple progressive methods to grow any business, and when to turn down the volume.
3. Case studies, examples of best practice and personal experiences are threaded through this book.
4. Plus he refers to lots of other great content you can use to grow your expertise and success.

If you market or sell anything- this is the book on todays methods.  Its educational, thoughtful and inspirational.  He is a good writer, so  its a fine read.

I rate this a must buy.

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Kudos to Peter Hrabinsky of Antaractica  who flew in a ticket for me to watch these sessions yesterday. Peter , you are a prince (and you have played hockey with Guy Kawasaki).

The Master of Ceremonies Ron Tite,  did a great job relaying the brilliant tweets from the attendees through the event.  The speaker line up:

More smartphones sold last year than PCs

Amazon Prime makes any item an impulse buy

Youtube is still second highest search engine

Some kids will never use a mouse and keyboard.

Check out apps Snaptel, Bazaarvoice

New lines:

• Utilitarian marketing  (Charmin has an app on clean toilets) and

• Create real  utility and real value

He came up with the best quote of the day:  ”Steve Jobs came down from the mountain bearing tablets.”

How does your company differ from competitors.?

What do you promise and deliver that others can’t?

Interesting people in your company stay interested.

Just answer the phone.  gethuman.com

There is amazing talent available ( unpaid) in your client, fb,twitter, linkedIn communities. Tap into it

Great leaders act with a sense of humbetition

Best speaker of the day – funny, engaging, personable and he was the uber geek – numbers that really made sense

He was very clear about great ads (Googles $500 superbowl ad – the trip to paris) and dumb ads ( Bings information overload)

Great ads make you feel very good.

His latest book goes well beyond the original metrics and shows us how to find the economic value

of the social media platforms.  If you do the work you can find the justifying numbers with present tools.

He gave ideas about how important it is to still track bounce rate (how badly do you suck?), visitor loyalty,

visitor recency, conversion rate, task completion rate, (yet with all the metrics on activity – you really are only measuring 2% of the economic value = revenue + value)

There is still a lot of value left on the table with present reports. Do this at your peril cause the boardroom needs to know more. How would you quantify the value of your second level Twitter touches?

Explained how to make better use of Youtube data. (Views, likes dislikes) ,  Google offers was his eg., and mentioned that Youtube is a great testing ground for ads potentila for success before you run them big time

How to use Google optimizer on AB testing. ( reference to Obamas campaign donation webpage)

New acronym,   Company marketing is decided by HIPPOs. Highest Paid Persons Opinion.

Hard scrabble guy from Brooklyn.  Dropped F bombs all the time.

This was the most refreshing speaker of the day.

He is a good measure ahead of the regular crowd, and not afraid to say it.  He is sending me a copy of the book to review

“Its now all about listening, including using search inside twitter”.

The disruption by the Internet continues.  Everyone will underestimate it . Just this week, what will be the impact of General Mills going directly to Groupon to offer coupons – what does that do to WalMart and other retailers?  Who loses control over their market?

The battle that matters is over the content in context.  You will “check in” when you check in at the bar and the waiter then  offers you a free shot of JDaniels.

Customer acquisition has been mapped by the geeks.  If you do not understand this you are like the marketers using social as a broadcast ( Like me to win an ipod) instead of being a listening post. The day of the talkers is fast ending.

The battle moves to total lifetime value of a prospect – keeping all you can get.

What happens when WofMouth closes business and it scales. When it hits the customer with context.  This is not interactive billboards, people on the road are not looking at the billboard – they are texting and talking.

It is now about the execution that makes sense in a business, its about the humans – take the millions wasted today in a company, employ 50  passionate people who can execute one on one contextual marketing from lonelyguy15 to Obama.  Go from being a just merchant to being a service.

Check out Never Say Never  film on Justin Bieber – you will learn about attention to the customer. Pdf of his slides – gina@garage.com

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wired and dangerous. how your customers have changed and what to do about it.  Chip R. Bell & John R. Patterson. 2011. ISBN 9781605099750. Bell & Patterson have written several great books on customer service.  This one does not disappoint.  They have brought their core beliefs right up to date with the Internet customer.   The customer has all the power with respect to Internet information access.  the vendor still retains the ability to create a great or not so great experience.  They do a good job explaining why the trend to self serve is not always in the customers interest and how to be better at service  anyway.  Lost of great examples round out this easy to read book .. There is something for every business leader in this book . In our experience in Content marketing practice, their tips on voice of the customer and front line workers are very useful.

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Voice of the Customer Marketing. A revolutionary five-step process to create customers who care, spend and stay. Ernan Roman. 2011. ISBN 9780071740838. This is a good complement to companies who wish to use buyers’ language and buyer behaviors to drive their own growth in content marketing.  Roman is very experienced in Voice Of the Customer (VOC) work and this book is immediately useful to you.  He is a pragmatist with lots of street cred in this area. Each chapter has clear and useful case studies. Some points:

• At the end of the day companies do not change because of data,. They change because of VOC.
• 68 % of customer defection takes place because customers feel poorly treated.
• 95 % of complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint instantly.
• Are you guilty of customer manipulation? (You can’t get this data until you fill in this form and allow us to drown you in untargeted emails.)
• Companies that outsourced their call centers often fail faster .

Very good addition to your marketing library. It will prevent you from making some serious blunders.

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