Marketing and Selling
Michael T. Bosworth. Solution Selling: A System for Difficult to Sell Products; and Customer Centric Selling. Both books look at the sales process from the perspective of the customer, how to focus on value-added services, and how a company’s sales methodologies can actually provide, in and of themselves, a competitive advantage.
**TOP CHOICE Seth Godin. Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. Godin has written many books on marketing, yet this is one of my favorites. The purple cow is the fifth P of marketing—how to make your product or service remarkable.
Christopher W. Hart. Extraordinary Guarantees: Achieving Breakthrough Gains in Quality and Customer Satisfaction. Examines the economics of offering your customers a 100 percent money back guarantee, especially for service firms. Required reading for any company wanting to utilize this strategy in order to gain a competitive advantage, add more value, and lower customer risk.
Theodore Levitt. “Marketing Myopia,” Harvard Business Review, September–October 1975; and “Marketing Success through Differentiation—of Anything,” Harvard Business Review, January–February 1980. Levitt is the marketer’s marketer, offering many thought-provoking insights, and forcing executives to think about their business from the perspective of the customer.
Neil Rackham. SPIN Selling; and Rethinking the Sales Force: Redefining Selling to Create and Capture Customer Value. The first book presents a sales method, backed by significant empirical evidence from effective sales forces around the world. The second book will help companies move from “transaction selling” to “consultative selling,” and finally to the most valuable relationship of all, “enterprise selling.”
Roy H. Williams. The Wizard of Ads: Turning Words into Magic and Dreamers into Millionaires; Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads; and Magical Words of the Wizard of Ads. Three splendidly written books with many insights into human behavior and effective advertising.
Mahan Khalsa. Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play: The Demise of Dysfunctional Selling and the Advent of Helping Clients Succeed. This book outlines a sales methodology focused on value, while recognizing that both the seller and the buyer have to benefit from the transaction. It is well written and the advice is practical.