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Value-Based Pricing. Harry MacDivitt & Mike Wilkinson.2012. ISBN 9780071761680.  This is one of the best texts on this topic I have run up against so far.  First the descriptions of pricing and how it is arrived at is succinct, clear and bang on the money.  Second this is the first pricing book that really identifies how many objections that sale can find with changing the pricing strategy  as well as the huge obstacle that sales is to implementation.  Then they do show you how to capture customer value in order to extract the price you deserve. The case studies at the end of the book are a bonus for those serious about implementing value based pricing. This is a must have reference for sales and marketing organizations as well as CEO’s.  Plus with both authors from the UK, they do not waste a word- it is all clear and valuable.

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• The Art of Pricing: How to find the hidden profits in your business. Rafi Mohammed. (regnordman.com)

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Social Media Analytics. Effective tools for building, interpreting 7 using metrics. Marshall Sponder.2012. ISBN 9780071768290.  This is not a trivial book. It cuts right through the hype and shows the marketing professional how to extract metrics to demonstrate the usefulness of social media. It is chock full of current tools and where they are useful and where not.  The book follows two cycles. The basics and the advanced.  The advanced is deep and well described. Like any other practice to do this well requires  hard thoughtful work. I defy the 20 something flash in the pan social experts to get their heads around this stuff.

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Zarella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The science, design, and engineering of contagious ideas.  Dan Zarella. 2011. ISBN 9781936719273.   This is a short but useful compendium of “stuff that works’ for driving online engagement using social media.  It was a free Kindle book, sponsored by Hubspot and Mailchimp.   For inbound marketers this is a useful book.  His examples and studies are real, valid and immediately applicable.  Easy to read and reasonably organized.  I enjoyed some of his insights as they are not as readily available elsewhere such the decline in Twitter follower count through the use of negative comments, as well as self references, for example. His timing studies as to when to release information are very current and seem counter intuitive, but I have noticed the same thing recently.  Grab it.

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Maximizing Lead Generation. The complete guide for b2b marketers. Ruth P. Stevens. 2012. ISBN9780789741141.  The subhead is really true, this is a thorough and complete book on lead gen. Combine this with Brian Carrols work and you have all you need.  I recommend this book for the beginner through to the grey haired pro. Sure the tools will continue to improve, but the basics as laid out by the author are very very current. Warning, read this carefully as the  author is concise and direct, so it is up to you to understand each part of each step, including the need for great copy. A great addition to marketing literature and I suggest this is a must buy.

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The Marketing High Ground. The essential playbook for B2B marketing practitioners everywhere. J. Michael Gospe Jr. 2011. ISBN 9781456439804.  I really liked this book, reading it in one sitting.  He was an engineer, but unlike me  instead of turning to sales, he went into marketing of high tech. And the man can write! You will recognize the players/politics of the tech world with his clear grasp of the industry reality.  I thought  my partner, Geoffrey Hansen could have written this book as Gospe looks at the world with a very good grasp of process. (This is likely due to his grounding at HP and Sun )  His experience allows him to simply and clarify marketing to its essence.  This makes this a very useful book to help any marketer grab the high ground earning more respect from his colleagues.  The beginner through to the master marketer can learn much from this book. He also lays out common frustrations and traces them back to the source. His approach is customer based, using that knowledge for  segmentation, positioning and creating personas. He provides a step by step process for doing this. I especially appreciated his sage advice for young marketers to not get sidetracked by fads ( e.g. social marketing) and neglect the basics. Buy it, read it and keep it close.   His website is  http://marketinghighground.wordpress.com

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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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Conversion Optimization. The art and science of converting prospects into customers. Khalid Saleh & Ayat Shukairy. 2011. ISBN 9781449377564.  Guy Kawasaki says ,”this book explains both the geeky stuff and the soft stuff. ” Too true. I though this was going to be dry tedious reading and was I wrong. From the first few pages I found this book to be refreshingly clear, well organized and eminently readable.  I was very pleased to see how much the authors agreed with our own marketing framework and persona work of the Content Marketing course. If you sell anything on the web, this is a must have marketing book for your library – it will not grow stale or out of date in a hurry.  There is too much in here for me to even attempt to summarize it.

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The Upside of Irrationality. The unexpected benefits of defying logic at work and at home.  Dan Ariely. 2010. ISBN 9780061995033. The sequel to Predictably Irrational by one of my favorite economists. His stuff is just so “useful”. You will learn about many interesting things like:

• The disincentive value of very high cash bonuses
• How creators place a very high value on their work
• Not invented here is a very basic flaw in our makeup
• the “identifiable victim” impact on fundraising
• the failure of online dating to solve the singles problem
• how emotional cascades impact on decisions
• the danger of theorizing without the data (trusting your gut)

Very readable, so human, the writer spins a compelling book that I could not put down.

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Part 1 of these posts talked about how power in the market has shifted to the buyer. (Reference Voice of the Customer Marketing by Eaman).  Thus the focus in of marketing and sales  is to learn as much as possible about the buyer’s journey.

The marketing and sales departments must work together to extract value stories to help marketing build out:

• Agreement with sales on what is a sales ready lead (Reference: Brian Carroll)
• Knowledge of all the stages that a buyer goes through internally prior to and during a decision to purchase  ( Reference: Sharon Drew Morgen)
• The unique value(s) that they can demonstrate they bring to the buyer ( Reference: see how LeveragePoint can help)
• Knowledge of what buyers find valuable from dealing with your sales force. (Have salespeople earned the right to talk to buyers?)
• Campaigns that place the needed proof in front of the targeted buyers well before they engage with sales. (Lead your prospects to value, not a sale. Reference: Ardath Albee)
• The changing proof needed for each stage of the buyers journey.
• Segmented value proofs for the many different individuals participating on the buyer’s side (You deal with a committee).
• Compelling value stories that bolster the salesman’s efforts/confidence in using a value based, not pricing based approach.

This is an investment in time and effort that builds a long term sustainable sales funnel. Research has shown that at any one time only 5% of your “suspects” are in buying mode. This leaves 95% which need to be nurtured by marketing until they raise their hand.  As I said in the first post, the buyer decides when they will interact with you.

A recent LinkedIn Answer by Ian Dainty is relevant at this time on  Who is Responsible for Generating Leads, Sales or Marketing?

Ian Dainty • Here is my two cents worth.
Because I have been in the B2B tech space for over 35 years, as a sales rep, marketer, executive and owner, I have seen all kinds of scenarios. I came from the “dialing for dollars” days, when no SMB tech company had a marketing department. The sales rep did it all.
However, after all of this time, and through years of research, executive interviews, and being in the trenches, I have been able to make some good observations that work.
If you have a company, with under $100M in revenue, then marketing’s main function should be to generate leads. (or as we used to call them – suspects). This should be done through Direct Response Marketing (DRM). DRM includes emails, letters, Social Media, PPC, advertising, etc., anything that asks a suspect to put their hands up and ask for your free content, whether that be a white paper, a free download, etc

.
I have seen too many marketing VP’s spend their time designing logos (seriously) as if this is going to help build a company brand. Marketing needs to bring in and nurture leads, until they are qualified by sales.
Sales should qualify leads. Unfortunately, very few sales people know how to qualify properly, and end up chasing leads for months. Hence the long sales cycle in most B2B tech companies. Please go to my blog for more information, especially “How to Stop Chasing Dead Leads” http://bit.ly/mgCTGo But I digress from the topic here.

Once a lead has been qualified as far as timeframe and need, and this where most qualification processes fail, then sales should take over. If it is simply a tire kicker, then marketing needs to keep nurturing.

Too many sales people spend their time either cold calling, not needed if you have at least $1M in revenue, and/or not knowing how to qualify, and chasing dead leads.

Sales should also generate leads, through three main avenues. They should be asking for referrals from clients. They should be getting testimonials for use by marketing. And more importantly, they should be generating more business in each of their current clients.

Many sales people fail on all fronts. But marketing needs to take on the lead (suspect) generation for a company.

Thanks Ian, I could not say this any better. Next what does Sales have to do to implement a value based selling approach.

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Killing Giants. 10 strategies to topple the Goliath in your industry. Stephen Denny. 2011. ISBN 9781591843832.  The author has put down 33 first hand stories  ( Eg Vibram barefoot runners, Dunking Donuts taste test,  Jetblue) organized under ten different strategies.   This is a book that should be in hands of every small business owner or small division owner. The stories are compelling, recognizable and very well organized  (The author has a strategy for that as well)  Smaller companies should be more nimble and market responsive than the giants.   Great line that I extracted, over time incumbent companies grow to resemble their markets ( like owners look like their dogs) .  Large companies acquire habits that smaller firms can get around and find opportunities.  Good read and well put together.

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