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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 If you sell anything on the web, this is a must have marketing book for your library – it will not grow stale or out of date in a hurry.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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Social Marketing to the Business Customer. Listen to your B2b market, Generate major account leads and build client relationships. Paul Gillin & Eric Schwartzman.  2011. ISBN 9780470639337.  Timely, current and very well written this is the book you have been waiting for to dish up how and why you can leverage social media through the entire buying cycle.  I was very impressed with their chapters on  Getting ROI and Generating Leads. In our two courses, Content marketing and Digital Tools for Sales we use very similar approaches to the topics covered in this book.  The two authors are old hands at this and technology marketing, so their advice is immediately usable while helping build good plan for long term sales growth.   If you read one book this year on this topic , make it this one.

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Sawyer the granddog

This weekend we have been babysitting Sawyer, the granddog.  Sawyer is my son’s 3 yr old Shiba.  This is an ancient breed from Japan, and it seems ideal for an apt.  Very laid back smaller dog, no bark to speak of and quite smart.  I have found Sawyer to be well trained to heel, responsive to attention ( and then when he has enough he just lays down and sleeps) and trainable.  He eats little, requires minimal exercise and does not appear to enjoy splashing in puddles = clean coat and dry feet.He is socialized with other dogs, but not a great fan of small breeds.

I learned at the pet store that he is called a grand-dog , and this may be all we get for quite awhile,  since only one of my sons (Joel and Sheena)  has been in any rush to get married and give us grand-kids ( the well traveled Tea’,  today in Ethiopia).   However this has been a fun visit and I hope we get to look after him again, especially when I am back into running (Having pulled the other Achilles a month ago – using the Vibram five finger shoes).

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The No Asshole Rule. Building a civilized workplace and surviving one that isn’t. Robert J. Sutton. 2007. ISBN 9780759518018. This is so funny and true that it hurt to read it.  I could have used this a few times in my work life – one of the reasons I went into consulting was gaining the ability to chose who I work with – never regretted it.   Guy Kawasaki posted an online survey to self diagnose how much of an asshole you are .  This book is required reading if you work in a tech company.  Well written, clear prose that makes your day better!

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In order to sell based on value, the sales team must know (and believe in) the value their product brings.  The previous post sketched out the how marketing needs to extract and describe the value stories.  Now  the sales department needs to learn and add new skills based on the value stories coming from the  marketing department.  The proper evidence, examples, testimonials, and success stories will help grow a salesman’s confidence to successfully sell on value.

These are not quick skills to learn as old habits and beliefs are hard to change.  There is also a basic skills gap in the younger sales forces. There are fewer firms that still provide a quality sales training program. Many of those new to sales will learn their basics  in the school of  hard knocks, which leads to bad habits.

A proactive sales organization, recognizing this,  can shape a sales person’s behaviors toward value  selling through a planned combination of training and reward systems. By shifting comp schemes toward a very heavy weighting on margin vs volume, salespersons will shift their approach.  This will not happen however if the revised relevant support material from marketing is not present.  A further impediment is having a C-Suite which still recognizes volume and lacks the maturity/patience to shift to margin based rewards.

We know that questions on pricing  will occur in two separate parts of a sale,  the early “give me a ballpark (budget)  price” time  and the  very late stage when the “your price is too high” negotiation statement occurs. Sales departments  which show success in growing margins and profits by using value selling techniques  possess well crafted  resources and training to anticipate these pricing question times.  This is a team effort between marketing, sales, customer service and finance to make this adjustment.

A great reference for thought leadership on this is Ardath Albees website

Next some successful training tactics for value selling organizations.

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The Trophy Kids Grow Up. How the millennial generation is shaking up the workplace. Ron Alsop. 2008. ISBN 9780470229545.  One can read this book two ways. First to rail against the millennials who

• job hop
• seem entitled
• are not willing to wait to climb the corporate ladder
• want it all, quickly
• are unafraid to challenge the bosses
• seek a meritocracy
• bring along helicopter parents
• seem to need endless feedback
• require detailed checklists of explicit work directions
• prejudge a company from what its website says
• a lack of manners and suitable etiquette

Or you could hail them for

• a much better sense of real altruism than any generation so far to date.
• seekers of  work life balance
• a desire to get the work done, in any location and then do what they want
• reducing the need for huge offices and cube farms
• working for much of the time without supervision and not just nine to five.
• showing how intrinsic motivation is a growing influence on modern productivity ( See Driven by Dan Pink)
• helping break us all free of the reward punishment management model ( which Dan Ariely shows is counter productive today)
• using any and all technologies at a whirlwind adoption rate.

I think I will hail them for their pressure on HR and recruiting systems. I will recognize that having four generations in the workplace now calls for some pretty serious negotiation and mediation skills. But our culture is evolving and will not stop.  This is a clearly written book, based on what is really happening in the workplace as we have all seen it. If you have to hire people today, you need to read this book.

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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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The Art of Pricing: How to find the hidden profits in your business. Rafi Mohammed. 2005. ISBN 1400080932.  Out of print but still available on a Kindle this is a book by the author of the 1% Solution. It has a slight B2C slant but the basics of effective pricing are there. I especially appreciated the description of the ground breaking work done at Ford on pricing.  The idea of setting margin as the sales goal versus volume has been set out before, but Ford exposed the profit margins on all products to the sales team with very profitable results.  Mohammed asks the practitioner to determine the naked net price of an item.  He is a fan of differential pricing – are the right customers paying the right prices?  He spends a good amount of ink on what is the value and  stresses that you can not assume that all players have the same definition of value.  In setting pricing he says you must temper your pricing objectives with a sense of fair pricing, company strategy, and the competition.  He has a useful template that asks you a lot of questions about pricing, which help lead you to better decision making.  This is a foundational book, which focuses on setting prices.

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Do the Work! Overcome resistance and get out of your own way. Steven Pressfield. 2011. ISBN 9781936719013.  A very useful little book, written to help get writers (and other sorts)  over the various blocks to their goal (blocks are all internal)  It was recommended by several folks including Guy Kawasaki.  Well written in a short punchy style, the book delivers on its promises.  If you want to write well, this will help.

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