Standout Virtual Events. How to create an experience an audience will love. David Meerman Scott. 2020. A very timely book. What these authors do is give you the psychology behind why to do these events a certain way.   The book is short in length but deep in content. Essentially these are lessons learned this year during the pandemic.   If you desire to be better at your virtual events, read this book.  Don’t just try to do the same old stuff as before – It will not work.

Account-Based Marketing for dummies. Sangram Vajre. 2016. ISBN 9781119224853.  I am always surprised how this series of books does the job. Well written clear and concise , it is useful to the  all levels of ABM knowledge as a first read.   IT may downplay how much work this method really is and the importance of the very early work to success later on.  What the author decries today is very true and without a material change of approach by sales and marketing the waste of dollars and effort with continue.  ABM is not new, (I used to call it Key Account Management)  but it  can be very effective with the tools and approaches we know about.

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The New Rules of Lead Generation. Proven strategies to maximize marketing roi. David T. Scott. 2013. ISBN 9780814432617.  The author is certainly very experienced in this role and topic.   His point of view is measurement and so he gives a great baseline education for applying measurement to the suite of marketing tools available.   He says this book is for companies that have whole teams to execute on sales and marketing and I tend to agree.  Most small companies  are really resource constrained.   That said, his first five chapters are some of the best setup for any marketing team I have found so far. He brings a refreshing and pragmatic view to how sales and marketing should work together.   He has a little something for everyone on these chapters and the ideas work.  In his ending chapters he talks about some good tools, however this is the only flaw in the book as time is not kind to this type of example as some of the tools discussed are no longer available.  I enjoyed how he differentiates between the high value  marketing generated leads and lesser value sales generated leads.  Good cross country air flight read – Easy to read style as well.

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LinkedIn Marketing Blueprint. 21 days to building an influential LinkedIn presence. Edmund Lee. 2013. ISBN  Edmund sent me this book to review and I am pleased he did. I have previously  boiled down for my clients a four weeks to LinkedIn mastery checklist. However I intend to have them buy this book from now on. In an easy to read and logical style the author shows you what to do to get a strong LinkedIn presence.  There are enough tips and ideas her to get you to put up  decent pages that will perform well for you.   The role of LinkedIn “expert” is a moving target as more people use the site and learn tips and tricks.   My only quibble is that I get my clients to look at groups sooner , to see if there are relevant conversations that are going on in their space.  I liked that the author looks at setting early metrics

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The Social Media Side Door. How to bypass the gatekeepers and gain great access and influence. Ian Greenleigh.2014. ISBN 9780071816731. The author has written a go to guide for individuals and sales/marketing folks to really address the power of social media and do much more than at present.  He has turned me around on innovative new ways of using Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn to reach out to prospects and targets/influencers. I was among the early  adopters and forget that many people are just new to these topics. That said the author has taken a very fresh look at these tools which makes the book applicable to a very wide audience.

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Feed The Startup Beast. A 7-step guide to big, hairy, outrageous sales growth. Drew Williams & Jonathan Verney. 2013. ISBN 9780071809054. Written by and for sales people in a fast moving company this is a book and a workbook all in one.  You can not argue with the currency or the topic selection. The authors really nail what you need to do in marketing and sales to “feed the beast” in today’s climate. The target is SMEs but anyone in a large enterprise could get a ton of value out of this book – and then feel the frustration of knowing what you need to do, but the company structure will not let you.  Concise yet the text just flows.  Every sales pro can grow with this one. A real win from McGraw Hill .

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The Flipchart Guide to Customer Advisory Boards. Vol 1 & 2. Mitch Gooze.  2013  Mitch  (The Customer Manufacturing Guy) asked me to review these two – books and I am glad he did. This a valuable addition to the sales/marketing literature.   Customer Advisory Boards are essential to build and grow smart companies.  We recommend to all our clients to build them.  So in these two volumes you have everything that you need to get your company ready to have one and step by step how to set up and run a CAB meeting.  Mitch has again done the marketplace a service.

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Curation Nation. How to win in a world where consumers are creators. Why the future of content is context. Steven Rosenbaum.. 2011. ISBN 9780071760393.  I confess, I am a content curator.  Maybe 5% of what I  put out on the web is my own content – book reviews.   The rest is material gleaned from 620 + RSS feeds I review five days a week.. I share about 20  items each day – which are queued up in Hootsuite so one goes out every few hours.  In my online travels I may post another half a dozen immediate tweets/G+ posts of things that are relevant to me in my “collecting” of items on sales and marketing “today”.

Rosenbaum goes into some detail about how the firehose of content needs to be curated – so you can pick and choose what is relevant to your interests/uses.  There are people who are doing that , Scoble, Kawasaki, Huffington Post.  Others rail against repurposing of content, eg Mark Cuban.

Who could benefit from this book?  Marketers, authors, journalists and anyone who proposes to be a content authority.  More of a whats happening vs what to do about it book, the insights are valuable. I believe him when he points out several business models that can spring from these ideas.

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Nederlands: Linked In icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing.Neil Schaffer.  2011. ISBN 9781463685805.  The unofficial practical guide to selling and developing B2b business on LinkedIn. This is a good book. We have been developing LinkedIn based strategies for some time now, but there is always something new to learn. Schaeffer is adept with this tool and gave me some great heads up . Eg LinkedInlabs Signal is a deep little known analytic tool we all should be using.   I learned about of the Premium professional offer that he found on the site – sweet. Lots more on getting better  searches, groups, feeds, company pages and so on. Good writer. Lots  of relevant case studies

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What the Plus!  Google + for the rest of us. Guy Kawasaki.  2012.   Guy takes you from the bare basics up to some  very valuable tips for the expert as well as extensions and software that will support you.  An unabashed G+ advocate, his easy reading style allows the arguments to take root. If you want to extend your use of G+ this s the one book to get you started , plus he provides sufficient resource links to keep your knowledge growing.   I enjoyed the book and it is a quick read.

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