The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Bill Bryson. 2007. Hilarious. This is a quick read, great  plane fare. Bryson the prolific travel and whatever writer, grew up in Des Moines in the ’50s. He takes you right back and makes you want to be there alongside him. I was reading this in a clinic yesterday and just kept busting a gut while waiting.

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1. Reengineer your products and processes so that customers never need to contact you in the first place.
2. Create self-service mechanisms (they suggest Web and IVR) with high success rates.
3. It’s much cheaper to be proactive rather than reactive.  If there’s a problem, tell the customer about it before they contact you.
4. Make it easy to contact you (e.g., web sites make contact information prominent and accessible).
5. The entire company has to “own” the problem.  Customer problems are rarely the result of customer service, but rather the result of poor design or execution by many parts of the organization.
6. Listen to the customer and communicate with them from their point of view.
7. Measure great customer experience by focusing on metrics such as number of contacts per order.

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Close Like the Pros. Replace worn-out tactics with the powerful strategy of Interactive Selling. Steve Marx. 2007. ISBN 9781564149541.  If you are a seasoned sales person/manager who knows the pain of too many Nos or no answer proposals, this is your book.  This is a fitting up to date replacement for the New Solution Selling.  Marx has been there, dione that and got all the T-shirts,. It is a pure sales book which happily ignores completely the need for nurturing etc.  But for pure in the trenches, gut feel selling this is the book.  I took a while to read it as the title put me off. But boy was I was mistaken. Marx could have been listening in on many Rocket Builders consults wrto sales and the buyer’s journey. He is so bang on.   Some insights:

• The salesperson gains power by empowering the buyer.
• Selling is tough but so is buying today.
• Your prospects want to buy, why would you be invited.
• Contracting is essential to set and maintain buyer expectations.
• What is the buyer doing to move the sale forward?
• Use half baked/straw man ideas before you present the maximum idea
• Use progress reports to show how far you have come
• A critical path details where you are going.
• There is no correlation between a rapid turnaround of a proposal and a good sale. None.

This is a salesman’s/manager’s must buy book

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I was reminded today about the creed of the ethical headhunter. Once your company is a client, there is no poaching of talent. Because of this, companies that are hard to work for and thus have a revolving door of talent, are seen as headhunter hunting grounds. If approached by such a company, the market wise headhunter will defer to be engaged. They know a good crop opportunity when they see it. So the lesson for you folks is to look at yourself in the mirror and see if your company is  worthy enough to employ a headhunter?  Of course if you are a reader of this blog, you are worthy anyway.   However you probably know of some that are unfit.  I certainly hope you have not invested in any of them1

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Summer fiction: Times Eye (Arthur C. Clarke)  and The Poe Shadow (Matthew Pearl)

Time’s Eye. Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. 2005. ISBN057507647x . What if Genghis Khan met up with Alexander the Great at the height of their powers? And each army had 19th century British and 21st century Russion American, English and Afghan advisors?  This book rocks along with the improbable, with lots of history included to help those poor American who forgot all theirs.  It also includes Rudyard Kipling as an observer.   Good airplane book, if you still go on them.

The Poe Shadow. Matthew Pearl. 2006. ISBN 784655084.  Pearl attempts to solve the mystery of Edgar Allan Poe‘s death by using Poe’s own characters brought to life to solve the “crime”? He writes in the Victorian style (like reading Arthur Conan Doyle). Despite the absence of violence, sex or improbable situation comedy,  this is an enjoyable book.

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Topgrading for Sales. World-class methods to Interview, Hire, and Coach Top Sales Representatives.  Bradford D. Smart &  Greg Alexander. 2008. ISBN 9781591842064.  Stats from this book:  In the USA the national failure rate in the sales profession is 40% which is also the annual turnover/ termination rate.  The life of a sales manager is 19 months.  The cost of a sales mis hire is easily $600 000, which translates into a mis hires annually in the US of about 8  million people annually ( or 8million  * $600k = ?) . Alexander teamed up with Smart to bring top grading to Sales.  While at GE, Alexander did wonders with this approach. He strive to only hire the top 5 % of the sales guys. This book contains everything you want to know on how to do this.  Lots of very very useful advice here.  My only  concern is for those of us in small regional markets like Canada etc, how big is that 5% pool?  Not very, so what is a smaller co to do?  I think there are great ideas here on how to hire better people which will make your management  tasks that much easier. If you have to take folks as they come, you will know out of the gate that some of them are going to take lots of your resources in order to be successful   The gem for me was the idea of having a virtual bench, ie knowing who in your market you woudl like ot have working for you that are not, nurturing reltionships so that when you need fresh faces in the filed you have a connectors/prospects  bench to go to. Lots of work, but it is a valid idea.  Every Sales manager should have this one on their shelf.