Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way. Michael J. Webb and Tom Gorman.
2006. ISBN 13 978 1 4195 2150. If you only buy one book this year on
Sales and Marketing, this is the one. Over ten years of practice and
application placed in a breakthrough book. Webb has delineated where
high performance sales and marketing teams must move to in the present
day. Well beyond solution selling he addresses how to meet the customers
business goals, while eliminating the waste and uncertainty in today’s
sales and marketing approaches. We just completed an amazing set of
engagements where we took a lot of waste/uncertainty out of sales and
marketing programs, yet Webb has provided more tools allowing us to go
even further. The subject is well treated, you learn a lot and the co-writer
is a good writer. Buy read, read again, again and apply, learn,
re-apply. Am I excited? You bet!

Book reviews for the business side of the technology industry.

Marketing Led Sales Driven. Ajay K Sirsi. How Successful Businesses Use
the Power of Marketing Plans and Sales Execution to Win in the
Marketplace. 2006. ISBN 141202178. I discovered this book while
researching the question,” What is the effective linkage between
marketing and sales that gives a company the best shot in the market?”
This book’s abstract came up and it was very interesting. The book may
be thin (155pp) and easy to read, but it packs a big wallop.

If you really want to start to improve the effectiveness of your
marketing and sales efforts this is an excellent but terse guide. In
applying similar ideas (plus others) in a recent program
implementation, we were able to increase our cold call prospect to
qualified lead ratio to over 80% in a very short time. These numbers
are unheard of in our space. This has direct impact on sales cycles,
cost of sales and quarterly revenues. One word of advice, this approach
puts big expectations on your marketing person’s capability, but it
works. Only a few marketing types I have met look at the world this way.
Yet they were the incredibly successful ones. Definite addition to your
library, at a shocking price.

Book reviews for the business side of the technology industry.

Geoffrey Hansen and Reg Nordman founded Rocket Builders Canada Ltd. in 2000.
Its objective: advise technology-based companies on how to recognize and
build upon market opportunities.

With the so-called tech bubble bursting, “People up and down the coast were
phoning me, saying they needed help to focus on revenue,” said Hansen, who
was then employed with the Ventures West firm’s Western Technology Seed
Investment Fund. “So I called Reg,” who had parlayed a UBC mining
engineering degree into numerous hardware-and software-industry jobs, “and
said: ‘There’s an opportunity here.'”

One of the first things the pair did, though, hardly involved rocket
science.

Vancouver, like many other communities, was awash with techies wondering
what had hit them. Hansen and Nordman’s response was to order beer and
pretzels and invite the reeling geeks to weekly gabfests.

Their sessions drew 15, then 30 and, by 2004, up to 60 attendees before a
reviving tech economy reduced the frequency. But when Hansen and Nordman
called another get-together at the Roundhouse Community Centre Nov. 30,
almost 150 folk turned up.

They’ll likely get an attentive crowd from the investment community Jan 12,
when they present their annual Ready To Rocket report on B.C.-based private
companies they believe will capitalize on growth in the
information-technology sector.

The do is by invitation, but an inquiry to www.readytorocket.com might get
you on the list.

Firms on the 2005 list ran from Air Games Wireless Inc. to TAP Solutions
Inc.

Calling it North America’s only such predicted list, Nordman said 10 of the
25 are often partnered with Microsoft in some way. In a break with pattern,
though, only one of last year’s 25, PureEdge Solutions Inc., was acquired by
a larger firm (IBM). Usually, he said, three firms rated by Rocket Builders
are snapped up.

Rocket Builders’ mainline business, though, is to help clients make money.

The risk that entails, of course, is taking assignments from outfits that
aren’t making any.

“We have now minimized the number of worthless stock certificates sticking
to our walls,” said UBC graduate mining engineer Nordman, 56, who has a
three-decade record with hardware and software firms.

Such risks notwithstanding, Hansen and Nordman needed only two years to pay
back the $200,000 seed capital their firm’s anonymous “angel” furnished in
2000. They have operated on cash flow since.

Rocket Builders has two typical types of clients, Nordman said. “One:
revenue falls, sales leads fall, sales decline. Two: brand-new product, new
market, and they want to get to revenue quickly.” The ideal, though, is
“three years old, with over $1 million in revenue, maybe eight employees,
and they want to get to $5 million in two-plus years.”

As for that final step, “We are very familiar with how engineers fail to see
marketing opportunities,” Hansen said.

Not surprisingly, the first two titles in a six-book project the two have
launched are: How a Company Can Develop a Marketing Ploy and Business For
Engineers.

They hope to self-publish the series with all the irreverence and
promotional brio of author and marketing guru Seth Godin. “But let’s put it
in perspective,” said Nordman, “We still have our business to run, and it
takes money to buy whisky.”

Meanwhile, they are still buying beer and pretzels and prodding a
once-sputtering local industry back into orbit.

Book reviews for the business side of the technology industry.

Best read on marketing all year
The Marketing Playbook. Zagula and Tong.2004. ISBN 1591840384. Here is one of the two best books for me for 2004. This plus Christensen makes a go to market specialists day! Lots of the content is allover their blog, http://marketingplaybook.com/ But the book is a library keeper. If you have been around the product launch block at least once, you will really see the merit of the content of this book. The two authors developed and launched MS Office, Backoffice, NT Server and other key MSoft technologies. Learn from their chronicled mistakes, which go beyond the obvious. And hey they are both VCs now! You can also catch them in various talks in Seattle still. They keep it simple, straight forward, and no not easy, since this involves very hard work to get it right! Easy, fast read, that I will reread a few times. Thanks to Troy for pointing this one out to us!

Book reviews for the business side of the technology industry.

Venture. Jeff Cox. 1997. ISBN 0446516414. Cox co wrote The Goal and Zapp! which are business classics. Venture is a business novel about a start-up that has all the typical issues, but Cox weaves in all the “good” ideas we hear about in a believable matrix. I read it in one sitting, an easy read. This should be required reading for lots of start-ups and those mentoring them. It has lots of easy to understand truth. Its in the remainder bin, or the library.  Try Abebooks.com