Rocket Builders  are seeing an uptake in NA sales for the bulk of our clients.  They are beating their sales quotas quarter after quarter.  This is with sales funnels that are slimmer than in the past.  Prospects who are finding these clients today are more motivated to buy than ever before.  The purse strings for these products  have been loosened.  These are the same clients of ours who did not see a downturn in ‘08 , because they have “must have”  products.

If your company is not seeing similar  results, this could be an indicator of a very serious problem in areas such as product differentiation, your value proposition and/or your sale forces market approach.  Ask yourself, in a marketplace full of a sea of eager sales people, what advantages do you have if you and your sales force look and talk just like  everyone else?    The solutions to this are often simple and straight forward to implement, but they are not obvious.  They are there, just for the asking.

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Pow! Right between the eyes. Profiting from the power of surprise. Andy Nulman. 2009. ISBN 9780470405505.  What  a delightful easy to read and valuable book.  Nulman is a guy who has a whole host of successful campaigns behind him ( check out his client list!  When you read his thesis – you come up with , why not do it this way?  If you have any interaction/involvement with marketing – this is a must read book for you.  If you want a very enjoyable entertaining business book (That happens to “surprise” have some Vancouver related references.

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• Secrets of Social Media Marketing. How to use online conversations and customer communities to turbo charge your business. Paul Gillin (regnordman.com)

Secrets of Social Media Marketing. How to use online conversations and customer communities to turbo charge your business. Paul Gillin. 2009. ISBN 9781884956850. Paul wrote The New Influencers. This new book is a well researched and well written continuation of how he sees the marketing world still  evolving. This book is so filled with useful advice and numerous links (www.SSMMBook.com) that any review can not do it justice. Gillin’s  long history in the tech community makes him the correct guy to do this type of book.  I t is  a clear easy compelling  read.

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Blog Blazers. 40 top bloggers share their secrets. Stephanie Grenier.  2008. ISBN 9780981085203.  OK if you want to really be businesslike about your blog (or your companies blog), this is one meaty little book.  If you have no ambitions/questions/ideas about blogging, skip this post.

Take my example, I read the book slowly, enjoying the nuggets that each of the bloggers shared.  When I finished the book, I had a full day of work ahead  to  add the first five things to what I was already doing with this blog. My support guy wishes I had never read the book I am sure, since I have another ten things to do next update day.

This book reinforced and dramatically increased my utility and usage of Twitter, Stumbledupon and de.lic.ious  . I updated my Digg account and picked up that  RSS feed to Google Reader – awesome.  I have new ideas about trackbacks, retweets and commenting.

This book is likely the leadng best practises on blogging repository at the moment.  If this is

something you care about, you need this book.

You can get it on Amazon.com

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groundswell. winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff. 2008. ISBN 9781422125007. This is the seminal book on using social networking tools today. Forrester and these two authors have done the rest of us a terrific favour by putting this book (and blog http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/) together. This goes well beyond detailing how the tools are used by major companies, by closing the loop on how best to implement, with lessons learned and some of the red flags illustrated. It is on one book a blueprint of change I loved two comments – Your brand is whatever your customers say it is ( Its not about you) and Caterina Fake’s description of the “culture of generosity” (Ie why people add and edit content for free). I really enjoyed it and could not put the book down!

Selling against the goal. How corporate sales professionals generate the leads they need. Kendra Lee. 2005. ISBN 1419508253. Take this book and Brian Carroll’s book and you pretty well have the complete package of lead generation activities. Lee goes into detail and depth to give the sales professional a high value resource. If you just started with medium to large sized firm in sales, this book is a road map to high performance sales. It does assume two things, that you know how to sell and marketing is doing its job. These two assumptions apply so rarely to the small to medium business.

Another place where sales will run into an issue is that sales people are not good at creating good content and copy for lead gen programs. Its not in their genes. Of course they think they do. (I certainly did until it was proven over and over to me) Most of Lee’s copy examples are quite good, but some illustrate that fatal flaw about salesmen, they can forget that to get customer interest you do not start out talking about your Co. or yourself.

So although this is a must buy book for sales people, it does not address what you need in regards to great copy. You should combine your work laid out in this book with that of a  marketing peer who understands compelling copy. Of course as a good sales person , you could not at first tell the difference  ‘tween compelling copy and just copy. But, you will think you do.

Selling Against the Goal: How Corporate Sales Professionals Generate the Leads They Need

Presentation Zen. Simple ideas on presentation design and delivery. Garr Reynolds. 2008. ISBN 9780321525659. This picks up from Turfte’s “Beautiful Evidence” book and more so. If you give presentations at all you need this book. It is so far the best book on Powerpoint (Keynote) I have read. The ideas are not just talked about, you walk through how to do it with plenty of before and after pictures. A very graphical and stunning book. If you have ever felt that your audience was just not getting your message, or you understand why Steve Jobs out presents Bill Gates, or you appreciate the Guy Kawasaki style, then this is the book for you. Buy it, read and use it and do not lend it!

80% of DMs read email on a PDA. More great stuff from Marketing Sherpas 2007 report.

So how does your email content look like on a blackberry screen? If it is like most with HTML, its really bad. Would you read it on a Blackberry?

A lifetime ago I sold to UNIX gurus who ran multiple windows on their screens. Their mail window was small and narrow., If I sent wide emails, they looked terrible and did not get read. Well the blackberry has the same limitation but worse. Take a look. revise, tighten up your messages, and drop the HTML

Oh the same report says influencers are likely using regular screens. So they could not tell you this.

Content is a weapon, you must help clients find you.

In a recent post I mentioned that the sales process starts before you think it does Clients look for solutions long before they hit your website. This begs the question, how do you best create a weapon out of your content? The core idea is that you must populate the web with your content in as many places as possible so that the seeker can find you. This has to be much more than using SEO, paid ads, campaigns, newsletters, trade shows and magazine promotions/placements. Good content talks to seekers in their language, about their problem, using example companies just like themselves. To do this well, marketing has to really step up to the plate.

Marketing Sherpa tells us that 75% of decision makers use webinars as an information source. They love them! More decision makers than influencers use webinars . Do you make a regular use of webinars with good content on your site? Also, fewer folks each quarter are attending the live webinar, but they will go to them later (up to a year) This means your archive of webinars has a much longer lifespan than previously expected. Leave them up for as long as you can.

We help some clients become a thought leader in their field. This allows for numerous postings, comments, and article submissions on your site as well as others. This increases your cultivation of analysts who write about your vertical. Of course to do this you have to be a “leader”. Leadership is something that Canadian companies all to often squander until their US cousins figure out the business and do the sales and marketing right. Remember, prospects are not interested in you, they are looking for experience in solving their problem.

Todays blogosphere allows anyone to be a commentator on issues in an industry. There is a lack of thoughtful, regular, perceptive comment that stimulates discussion and idea generation. In less than a year. a thoughtful blogger who posts useful info on relevant sites with good follow-up content on their own site can become a thought leader.

The New Influencers. A marketers’ guide to the new social media. Paul Gillin. 2007. ISBN 1884956653. This title is a tad misleading, because the book is pretty well focussed on blogging, blogs, tagging and podcasts. The explosive nature of social media, means that much more has happened since he sent this book to the press. However it is still a good resource. The foreword by Geoffrey Moore is a treasure. Also the small stories about influencers etc in this area are very useful. (Do you know what Dan Bricklin is up to these days? ) Gillin sends you to some applicable resources. E.g. Podsafe music is “free” music that you can use on your podcast, provided the artist gets attribution. It will date pretty fast, but if you can get it from the library etc. it is a worthwhile read.