. How to instantly engage your market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now. David Meerman Scott. 2011. ISBN 9780470645956.  This book is really on top of the real time marketplace, by the author  right on top of this as well..  The premise was first, find put how the top 100 US companies are doing in the real time digital /social media space. So he sent out a request shaped around that he was writing a book on how companies are responding  to this change in the marketplace. What a hoot – it was incredible the number of companies that he could not contact, or who did not respond. As well the ones who did respond were quite interesting, who,  how soon ( minutes to hours to days)  and the way they did  (Personal, web form, take a survey, take a number and wait and so on).  Meerman Scott then build a compelling up to date case on what to do, how to do it, tools to use and where the rubber meets the road on sales results.    This gets my vote as the marketing PR book of the year. Its current, well researched and very well written. Every C-Suite dweller needs to read this one.

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Sales’ response to a price rise. Pricing part 9.   In many of the companies I have worked for, the last group to ask for a price rise would be sales.  Perhaps you have tried to institute a price rise or even harder, change the comp plan to reflect a net margin component.   (Its more work to manage revenue & net selling price than revenue.)  What are the typical sales responses?  Sound familiar?

• The sales force will not execute on anything that reduces their commission or jeopardizes their job.
• A variable commission on gasp “margin” can be seen as a penalty
• Maximizing volume is hard wired in many companies , so the team will always go for the Porsche, not the steak knives.
• Price protection requests will rise
• Long term contract obligations are brought up
• In the absence of tools, tactics and training on value selling, cowboy behavior will increase.

Aside from what the company culture rewards, there is a basic reason for these responses.   Customers lie, especially to sales people.  You lost the bid?  Someone else “had a better price”.  You won the bid?  You priced it “just right”.  Do not believe this.  You lose more by being outsold, not out priced.  You win, very often because you left so much money on the table (ie underpriced), but sales  will rarely  find out.

We see the lack of a truthful  win loss reviews to be holding back so many companies, companies that then take what sales tells them at face value.  By hiring a sales team, younger companies often hope they have solved their sales problem.  Again hope is not a strategy.

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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. 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.