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The pH Miracle For Diabetes. The revolutionary diet plan for type 1 and type 2 diabetics. Robert O. Young (Dr.)  & Shelly Redford Long. 2004.  ISBN 0446691003.  The author, a microbiologist, noted in his research that there was more to the diabetic increase in our populations than could be explained by what the medical profession was saying.  Not all diseases are caused by germs, but depend more on contributory factors within the patients own body.  Yes for Type 2 , obesity is a big one, evidently for every excess 10 pounds you carry your A1C goes up by a point ( and today most of us only have about 2-3 points to play with until we are pre-diabetic) .  Young’s premise is that our North American  diet is over acidic and it is this over acidity that wrecks havoc on our body.  To right this one has to do a fairly significant dietary makeover  Certainly increasing your raw veggie intake is a part of this as is the elimination of  acidic meats  (cold water fish is is quite good).  The tech industry is certainly full of folks like  Ellison and Jobs who are real advocates of raw foods. The book is a good easy read and  makes sense.  So if this is of interest to you, it is not waste of time.  Lots of recipes in the appendix.

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The Truth About Leads. Revealing little-known secrets that focus your lead-generation efforts, align your sales and marketing organizations and drive revenue.  Dan McDade. 2011. ISBN 9780983026709. This is a treasure of a book.  Absolutely agree with every word.  EG:

• Executive and C-Level management owns responsibility for providing high level market, message, and media  strategic direction.  and
• The strategic-level messaging most companies use does not work.

He also comes out against any firm that thinks using a metric like cost per lead tells them something useful. He is also against blueprinting.  A real advocate of nurturing leads until they are ready for the sales team. Begone the short term mindset.

A short. concise book full of nothing but the truth and how to do it. Every CEO, VP Sales and VP Marketing must have this book.  Buy it  and  keep it.

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The 1% Solution for Work and Life. How to make the next 30 days your best ever. Tom Connellan.  2011.  ISBN 9780976950622.  A business fable  that really talks tough and tells the truth on personal improvement.  Short, concise and clearly written this is a very useful book. By committing to 1% improvements in many aspects of our life, Connellan  helps you make steady growth toward your goals.  He also has the stats to prove it   E.g. From a Harvard/UCLA study; By being happier it can have a ripple  effect on people you do not even know.

If you are happy ,

• your next door neighbour is 34% more likely to be happy
• Your spouse is 8% more likely to be happy
• Your brother or sister living within a mile is 14% more likely to be happy
• Your friend living within  a mile is 2.5% more likely to be happy
• Your friend’s friend is 10% more likely to be happy.
• A friend of a friend of your friend is 5.6% more likely to be happy

Lots more in this delightful little book

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Shift!: Harness The Trigger Events That Turn Prospects Into Customers. Craig Elias & Tibor Shanto. 2010.  978-1450240079. I received a review copy of this book as a pdf.  I have a lot of trouble reading anything like a pdf. When I read like to make notes , flip back and forth, reread etc.  All becomes harder . So this book languished in my Download folder.  If  I had not loaded it onto my kindle (which I only tolerate)  , I would have never got to it.   It is a very useful book for increasing sales effectiveness.  Taking to the right people at the right time ( just after a trigger event ) when they are in a window of dissatisfaction  dramatically improves your win rate.  I know this is true because one of our most successful initiatives for clients revolves around using key trigger events.  I would have noted stuff all over this book, if I could.  There is lots of resources for you on the website . TriggerEventBook.com. Hint to authors -my trigger event is a real book!

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Achieve Sales Excellence. The 7 customer rules for becoming the new sales professional.  Howard Stevens & Theodore Kinni. 2007. ISBN 9781593376512.  (Thanks to David Moulton for passing this book onto me.)  Not since Neil Rakham did his in-depth interviews/research that resulted in SPIN Selling, has there been a  comparable professional study done of what customers want from salespeople.  The HR Chally Group ( Stevens is CEO)  interviewed 210 000 salespeople and 80 000 companies as well as interacted with hundreds of companies through their proprietary sales assessment tool.   This is based on their observations that:

• Two-thirds of college graduates now take sales jobs upon completion of their formal education and
• 0.8% of colleges and universities prepare them for those jobs.

This is a very valuable book.  It is easily the best foundational book on sales success in the market today. It aligns what we find over and over, companies are often blissfully unaware of how little they know about their customers.  If you really want to make the change to be a top performing sales professional or customer driven company here is how you start.

Stage One:  A customer wants you to know that (this is the lion’s share of your work)

• You must be personally accountable for our desired results
• You must understand our business
• You must be on our side.

Stage two (after you have become on of the better performing sales types) they you want to know that:

• You must bring us applications
• You must be easily accessible
• You must solve our problem
• You must be innovative in responding to our need.

Customers see the salesperson as the most influential component in a sale.

If you want to make the serious sales coin,  this is the book for you to start your journey with.

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How to Sell Anything to Anyone Anytime. Dave Kahle.. 2011 ISBn 139781601631312.   This is a little book , very easy to read, jam packed with sales power.  It is targeted at one to one sales people, especially in the small business market, however this is good foundation book for anyone starting in sales. (I would also recommend this to anyone starting or running a sales school.)  Written clearly, logically and packed with common sense, any sales person will dramatically improve his income through using the suggestions in this book. The author has written many books including a great one on questions  (Question Your Way to Sales Success)

The Price of Everything. Solving the mystery of why we pay what we do. Eduardo Porter.  2011. ISBN 9781591843627.

I am burning through every resource on pricing I can find.  The author is a New York Times journalist – and I do so love to read books by journalists.  They can write clearly, succinctly and well!  This book is an incredible journey through business, anthropology  and psychology. Some snippets.

• Market transactions do not necessarily provide people with what they want; they provide people with what they think they want. Consumers often have the most tenuous grasp of why they pay what they do for a given object of their desire. (This guy must drive economists crazy!)
• Value started as a moral inquiry, a manifestation  of divine justice (back when the Church ran the World)
• The real world is plagued with search costs. It is difficult for consumers to to find out what a given product costs in all the shops in town- let alone everything available on the Internet. One of the best known market techniques is to make it difficult for customers to understand where they can get best value for their money
• People value more things they bought than what they receive as gifts
• Imposing a fine on tardy parents picking up their kids at daycare worsened tardiness.  The fine made it affordable and removed the guilt.
• Even if an investor were to correctly call a bubble, it would be expensive to bet against it
  With enough investor enthusiasm, the bubble will stay inflated longer than the contrarian could remain solvent.
• Keynes believed that most investors really do not know what they are doing.  Sort of betting on the
  average response to average events. Keynes made a lot of money in the market.
• Expect increased right wing politics as the economy worsens

The author covers off the price of slaves, women, children, global warming, religious affiliation, horsemeat .  It is an eclectic and marvelous journey. Great book for a trip.

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