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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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Becoming an Exceptional Executive Coach. Frisch, Lee, Metzger, Robinson & Rosemarin.  2011. ISBN 9780814416877.  A book for those concerned with leadership and management change.  This is important as the largest weakness in companies is execution. The book uses numerous examples to explain concepts, plus providing many samples and templates for the practitioner.  Having a committee write a book means it come with a lack of personality to spice up the pages. However this is a reasonable base book for the beginning coach.

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How to Generate Real Sales Results from Digital Tools Like Social Media, Webinars and e-Content

Best Practices for Using Leading Edge Tools for Sales Success.

I am measured on results.  At Rocket Builders we have found that today’s digital tools give us those results.

– most sales people have not been successful using social media to generate revenue

– most webinars fail to engage the prospect sufficiently to advance the opportunity

– most content a salesperson shares with a prospect raises more questions than addresses the buyer’s needs

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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Last Saturday was the annual luxury cars show at VanDusen gardens in Vancouver. Combine incredible (for Vancouver) weather and desirable (and costly) cars  in a luscious garden made for a delightful way to spend a morning.   For those who love beautiful cars , clink on the link and enjoy.

Beauty in Red

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The first three parts of this series  have talked about the shift required in selling  today due to buyers having the power to decide when they will interact with you.  I also talked about the work that marketing and sales have to do to get ready to sell on value not price. This part discusses some of the training that has worked to change habits and beliefs.

In our training implementations we use short role playing (recorded) as part of the regular sales meetings. Each play has a short focus topic which is aligned with new or updated supporting assets.  Very quickly we find no lack of sales volunteers/commentators to play out and critique the
roles (sales people are so shy). Humor is important here.

Having the session recorded allows the client to build up a sales training library /resource for those who want to review on their own time. (This helps the salesperson who is on the road and misses a meeting)  The role playing goal is to clearly indicate the gap between preferred and poor approaches.  Some of popular topics have been:

• Buyers lie and other tales for sales virgins (discounting/negotiation)
• Beware the premature proposal, practise safe selling (discounting/knowledge)
• What buyers really mean when they say, “Your price is too high.” (negotiation)
• How buyers go to school on you. (negotiation)
• Fight the urge to broadcast in presentations, we are not the BBC (Communication skills)
• Do you deserve to take the meeting? (Knowledge of the customer)
• The customer does not care about you and that’s a good thing (Value and results)

The organization needs to be focussed on value not volume for this change to work.  If value selling is  new to the company, your market may have been trained to respond to pricing (allowing your product to be commoditized). Fixing this is a separate topic which others have addressed. (Nagle et al)

There is more information on pricing and value in the following series of posts.

Leverage Point

What can you do about pricing for value ?

The intent in this series was to give the reader a different  POV  showing a way out of the declining returns from push marketing and selling. By looking  first at the buyers process and meeting their needs all through in the process, marketing and sales teams are better positioning your company for higher profits and shorter sales cycles.  By adopting this approach a company is also setting themselves up as being different from the others in the  marketplace.  This also adds to your competitive position.

My warning is that this takes hard thoughtful work and attention to the details in execution.  Doing this poorly will leave you worse off than not doing it all.  Doing this well will just make you all very wealthy.

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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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