Leave the Hang-Ups To Us

What We Think is Worth Reading (part 3)

by Mark Horne, Guest Writer

(Continued from Part 1 and Part 2)

We are concluding a series about the books the Initial Call staff has found to be helpful in building their sales and business knowledge and skills. I hope you've found these posts informative. Be sure to leave your comments and let us know what you think about the books we've already reviewed, as well as what books you've found foundational.

Our first book in this post, The One Minute Sales Person by Spencer Johnson and Kenneth H. Blanchard, is from the same pair who wrote the best selling The One Minute Manager, as well as Who Moved My Cheese.  Sadly, unlike The One Minute Manager, as far as I can tell, The One Minute Sales Person is not available free online.

Like The One Minute Manager, The One Minute Sales Person is presented as a story.  An aspiring salesman wants to learn how to do better at his job.  To accomplish this he seeks out others to obtain their advice.  The advice ranges, but centers on caring about the potential customer, focusing on the customer’s needs, and helping the customer feel good about his purchases.  The book is written in a rather simple style, but it succeeds in communicating the basics of not only sales, but also all effective communication.

Another book, Stephan Schiffman’s primer, Cold Calling Techniques (What Really Works), is a great guide to understanding the importance of cold calling and the obstacles a salesman faces in making such calls.  It is noteworthy that this book was recently released as in a twentieth-anniversary edition.  It’s continuing popularity is no accident; Cold Calling Techniques remains a valuable resource.

Schiffman gives excellent guidance for making calls that get returned and that lead to meetings.  In addition to techniques and strategies, Schiffman provides a context for his advice with an explanation of why cold calling is an essential part of sales and business.  Your primary competitor, he writes, is not another business or product.  Rather, your primary competitor is the status quo.  People are happy (they think) with the way they are living and working now.  Otherwise, they would be the ones calling you.

Finally, Jim Collins is the author of Built to Last, a study of corporations that are (or were) indisputably great.  He says that he came up with the idea for From Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t when a businessman complained to him that focusing on companies that had been great from their inception wasn’t useful to the majority of corporations.  There were many good companies that could use guidance on how to become much better.

Thus, Collins describes Good to Great as a “prequel” to his earlier work.  He and his team of researchers studied eleven companies that made the transition from being good to becoming great.  As a result, Collins and his team developed a road map for companies that is laid out in his book.  While some of this material may seem like commonsense, the fact remains that only a few companies have made the transition.

While these are the nine titles that some of us have found helpful, we'd love to hear of additions (or even subtractions) from you.

What we think is worth reading (part 2)

by Mark Horne, Guest Writer

What books do the Initial Call staff think are most foundational and helpful?  I started to answer that question in an earlier post.  Now here are three more.  Just remember, like I wrote earlier, I’m not listing them in any particular order of value.

In Why Johnny Can’t Sell...And What to Do About It Michael Nick and Bob Kantin address the problem of sales people (and their supervisors) thinking or at least acting like it is sufficient to “show up and throw up” to generate sales, especially technology sales.  Merely making appointments to list the features one is selling is not enough.  They argue that bad habits were formed during the economy of the nineties, habits that are not going to produce increased sales now that the nineties are over.

Nick and Kantin want to teach not only sales people, but also their managers and supervisors, what is necessary to sell to a business where the decision-makers typically won’t buy unless the question of return on investment has been answered.  The book enables readers to

• Recognize gaps in sales training that need to be filled
• Increase selling power by creating the right tools
• Convey to customers assurance of success
• Measure for a prospect the value of a product or service
• Use persuasive proposals and presentations to prove that value

CustomerCentric Selling by Michael Bosworth and John Holland stresses the importance of knowing a product or service from the perspective of the person who is in a position to make the decision and who will benefit from it.  This means that mere user knowledge isn’t really helpful for making a great sale.  Knowing a product’s features as a user is not identical to being able to articulate how it can achieve a goal, solve a problem, or satisfy a need of the decision-maker.

Bosworth and Holland are concerned that both traditional salesmanship, and the more-or-less instinctive understanding of naturally-gifted salespeople is product centered and feature focused rather than customer centered.  Such sales people tend to gravitate toward users of the product rather than aiming at businessmen who make the decisions about the product for their company. Bosworth and Holland have a website that provides an excellent summary of their ideas about customer centric selling as opposed to traditional selling.

Brian Carroll is the president of his own lead generation company and a blogger.  Lead Generation for the Complex Sale: Boost the Quality and Quantity of Leads to Increase Your ROI sets out the issues facing sales people when they are forced to waste time on “leads” that aren’t really leads, or else simply do their own lead generation.  No one should be surprised to know that sales people would rather have more time to devote to more promising leads, but many times a company will devote their resources in a way that heads in exactly the opposite direction (hiring more sales people rather than spending more on marketing, for example).

Carroll argues that quality lead generation is good for any sales, but, for complex sales typical of a business-to-business transaction, it is imperative.  His book lays out the basics on how to get sales and marketing departments in sync, how to improve leads, and walks readers through the fundamental steps such as using various methods for generating demand, creating value for prospective customers during the process, and prioritizing leads.

What we think is worth reading (part 1)

by Mark Horne, Guest Writer

Naturally, these aren't the only books we think are worth reading!  We do have lives outside of work, after all.  Nor are these the hottest new books out there.  But these are the titles that stand out to us as presenting some of the basics.  They are not listed in any order of importance since we probably wouldn't all put them in the same hierarchy. In part one, we'll starting out with some management books, and part two will discuss sales and marketing.

Peter Block's Flawless Consulting is widely described as the "bible" for consulting.  It clearly sets out how to be a consultant from start to finish, taking you through the steps, warning you about the pitfalls, and giving you guidance for how to avoid them.  It gives guidance in a way that is understandable, using illustrative examples, case studies, and exercises to communicate to the reader how to be an effective consultant.

You can find out more about Block at his website.  There you will find his own rather interesting recommended reading list as well as links to interviews he has given about his insight.  It also provides links to some interviews with him (scroll down).

Additionally, his business site Designed Learning has many resources for getting to know him and his approach to business.

Business Week dubbed Peter Drucker, "the man who invented management."  He wrote for decades,The Essential Drucker spans all his best writings in 26 selections from ten of his many books, dealing with different topics related to management. The selections are chosen and arranged with the aim of giving the general reader a unified and substantial introduction to management.  Those who have read some of Drucker's books will find here a good reminder of the scope of his thought.  Those who haven't read him before will find this a valuable introduction.

For online information about Drucker, visit The Drucker Institute or the Drucker Archives at the Claremont College Digital Library.

In The Fifth Discipline Peter M. Senge makes the case that institutions, to survive, must be "learning organizations."  The deciding factor that will decide which companies successfully compete and which do not, is which ones are able to learn faster than their competitors.

Block describes to readers the five disciplines that must be mastered in an organization if it is to be a learning organization: spanning from 1939 to 1999.

•     Building shared vision
•     Mental models
•     Team learning
•     Personal mastery
•     Systems thinking

This last discipline, systems thinking, is the center of the book (as the fifth discipline) because it is the one that integrates the other four. Without thinking in terms of systems, solutions will be found to problems that, in the end, only make the problem worse.

Senge details the nature of the five disciplines as well as common traps that can beset us in management decisions.

We have more books here that we've found helpful and that we will list later.  In the meantime, what books to you find especially helpful to business and management?  Let us know.