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Social Media Sales Revolution. The new rules for finding customers, building relationships, and closing more sales through online networking. Landy Chase & Kevin Knebl. 2011. ISBN 9780071768504.  Brand spanking new from McGraw Hill and very current.  I am researching resources for a Social Media for Sales course we are presenting this fall.  This one is a good fit.

The author has a great line at the end:

Your prospects have moved but left a forwarding address. That address is found in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and the blogs they write.

The first chapters explain why the old outbound sales prospecting methods are giving lower returns. The book then shows the proactive sales person exactly how to leverage the new tools for 30 minutes a day to improve his sales numbers.  The chapters on really using LinkedIn and Hootsuite are priceless. I was able to immediately improve my LinkedIn profile.  As a result I had as best ever  one day increase in my Klout score.  The coverage of Twitter and Facebook is also valuable.  Could be the sales efficiency book of the year for me.  Most others have got this all wrong.

This is a must buy for the salesperson who wants to win.

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Crude Deception. Gordon Zuckerman. 2011. ISBN 9781608321438.  The second in a series ( I have not read the first).  This is a mystery novel placed in the years just at the end of WW II.  Thus you know the end result, so its not much of a mystery!  The journey is more important here than the destination. A group of wealthy individuals are concerned that post war control of the oil industry will be too concentrated in a few oil firms.   The novel has locations in US, Europe and Asia and shows knowledge of the prevailing issues, at least from one point of view. You see the formation of OPEC  and other post war institutions.   I could not get into this book. It seems to refer back to the first novel too much, implying that one was more exciting.  The author has some pretty good basic material to work with and decent character development. I would have liked to see the action spots/cliff hangers to be more descriptive, intense  and emotive. But that is just me.