Author: David Maister
Publisher: Spangle Press
Year Published: 2008
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

For professional service firms, David Maister has been the go-to guy for advice on how to run a successful service organization. I’ve been a fan since I read his books, True Professionalism and The Trusted Advisor, years ago and am an avid reader of his blog, so I was eager to pick up a copy of Strategy and the Fat Smoker.

What does strategy have to do with a fat smoker? For 37 years, Maister was a fat smoker. He knew he should quit smoking, lose weight, exercise, and eat healthy - yet whenever someone brought that up, his response was not, “Oh, I see, this behavior’s not good for me? Ah well then, I’ll stop, of course!” Rather, his more likely retort was, “True, but please shut up and go away!”

Maister didn’t change his habits until he was confronted with a major health crisis, but his own refusal to change made him think about why firms don’t change. After all, they often know what they should be doing, why they should do it, and often, even how to do it. So why don’t they do it?

Most firms are like people in that it’s difficult to do what’s good for you in the long term when you are constantly bombarded with short-term temptations. Sticking to what you should be doing requires sacrificing today’s comforts for discipline and future rewards.

Worse, many of us become disillusioned because we “try” to change our ways, succumb to temptation, and quit … only to repeat the cycle next time we vow to change. Of course, you don’t get much benefit from exercising only a few times a month. You can’t lose weight by eating more fruits and veggies but rewarding yourself with a large slice of chocolate cake at the end of the day.

The same logic holds true for corporate strategy - you won’t gain a competitive advantage by doing things “reasonably well, most of the time.” Rather, you must define what clients you will serve and which services you will offer - while turning down or referring out work that doesn’t meet those criteria - and stick with your decision. Strategy means saying “no” to some work so you can focus on what you do best, regardless of how lucrative the opportunity may sound in the short term - just as that chocolate cake may satisfy your sweet tooth now, but it moves you further from your long-term weight loss goal.

This may sound like common sense, self-help fluff, but Maister quickly delves into the specifics of how firms can commit to change with both employees and management on board. Starting with employees, Maister first tackles why most employees aren’t rainmakers: If they don’t love what they do, who they do it for, or feel enthusiastic about the firm’s stated purpose, why would they want to go out and get more of it? He then attacks compensation structures (hint: most people don’t work “for the money”) and proclaims “most training is useless” because managers want a quick fix rather than to deal with systemic problems. When discussing the appropriate time for training, he adds this gem:

“Here’s a good test for the timing of training: If the training was entirely optional and elective, and only available in a remote village accessible only by a mule, but your people still came to the training because they were saying to themselves, “I have got to learn this - it’s going to be critical for my future” then, and only then, you will know you have timed your training well. Anything less than that, and you are doing the training too soon.”

So what is the key ingredient to success? In Maister’s view: effective management. This section is really the heart of the book as Maister offers nugget after nugget of practical advice for how managers can better motivate and mentor their employees. In short, Maister feels it’s management’s job to make people want to get involved by explaining why opportunities are fulfilling, exciting, and worth sacrificing their time. Managers must lead by example - and he offers a fantastic example of excellent personal coaching in action when he describes how a senior colleague at Harvard Business School mentored him. This chapter should be required reading for every manager out there!

That said, not everyone will take Maister’s advice - as he points out in a chapter about why lawyers and law firms are different from other service firms. It’s somewhat disheartening to hear how lawyers are often too clever for their own good and have a low-trust culture filled with skepticism, detachment, desire for autonomy, and aversion to risk. He doesn’t see much hope for change until clients pressure lawyers to work in teams to deliver seamless legal service.

The book layout caters to the ADD-oriented business person by including a short pullout quote highlighting a main point at the bottom of each page. There’s more meat in the headlines and these quotes than there is in most business books. Like with his other books, Maister is fantastic at predicting what you want to know next and gives you plenty of examples, explanations, and action points to show you how to put his advice into practice now. If you manage people in any capacity, I highly recommend you read this book.

Author: Marcus Buckingham
Publisher: Free Press
Year Published: 2001
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

Now Discover Your Strengths is the follow up book to Marcus Buckingham’s best seller, First Break All The Rules. It’s billed as a management book, but only the last 50 pages focus on management. The bulk of the book focuses on how individuals can uncover their strengths and manage their weaknesses.

The Gallup Organization asked 198,000 employees “At work do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?”, those employees that “strongly agreed” that they used their strengths were 50% more likely to work in a business unit with low employee turnover, 38% more likely to work in a more productive business unit, and 44% more likely to work in a business unit with higher customer satisfaction scores.

Buckingham’s book is based on how employees can discover their strengths, which, he believes, will lead to happier employees that are more productive and fulfilled in their jobs. That may be so, but I also think the concepts work extremely well for entrepreneurs who are trying to clarify who they are and what services they want to provide.

The book is laid out in three main sections: The Anatomy of a Strength, Discover the Source of Your Strengths, and Putting Your Strengths To Work. It is structured around an online self-assessment quiz that will help you discover your core strengths. The book comes with a code you can enter into the site to take the quiz for free. However, you can only use the code once, so if you want to pass the book around to your friends, they won’t be able to take the assessment without first buying a copy.

Buckingham’s core philosophy is that rather than trying to fix your weaknesses, you should focus on your strengths. It’s your strengths that make you unique. What is a strength? Buckingham describes a strength as a “consistent near perfect performance in an activity.” Basically, there are two conditions for something to be a strength:

1. You must be able to consistently achieve good results (whether that be giving a speech, playing a good game of golf, or being able to form a network of supporters for a cause)
2. It’s a positive activity you enjoy doing it (negative activities that you might enjoy - like poking fun of others - wouldn’t be considered a strength)

There are three fundamental building blocks for all strengths:

1. Talent - defined as “naturally reoccurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior”
2. Knowledge - both fact based (what you can learn from books and classes) and experiential (what you learn as you go through life that isn’t taught in a classroom)
3. Skills - the steps to complete an activity (think of any “how to” tutorial or manual which lists the steps to accomplish something)

Knowledge and skills can be learned, but talents are something that are patterned within your neurochemistry and are difficult to change after a certain age. Talents are important because every day we make thousands of little decisions without thinking much about them - from which files to look at to whether we should do a task now or later to whether we should answer the phone or let it go to voicemail to how we communicate with people. Talents are things like being instinctively inquisitive or competitive or charming or persistent or responsible.

Buckingham provides a list of 34 strengths that his web assessment can uncover and provides a page overview for each strength. The book also includes tips for managing your weaknesses and a practical guide for managers, though many of the tips in the practical guide aren’t all that applicable to small businesses. Finally, there’s an FAQ on the research behind the online web assessment.

Overall, this is one of the better books on discovering your strengths and will be beneficial to anyone that’s evaluating what career would be best for them or service professionals who are looking to clarify what services they should offer clients.

Author: David Meerman Scott
Publisher: Wiley
Year Published: 2007
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

Is web marketing really so different from traditional advertising and PR that we need a new set of rules for how they work? David Meerman Scott says yes - and then shows you exactly how you can take advantage of those new rules to drive more traffic to your site and generate more leads and sales.

Broken into three main sections, The New Rules of Marketing and PR is really a book on Internet Marketing 101. Scott explains why the web changes the rules of marketing and pr, the tools (like blogs, wikis, podcasts, forums, search marketing and social media) you can use to get the most benefit, and how to create an action plan to start working with these tools right away.

So how is marketing on the web different?

Before the web, the only way you could get the word out about your products and services was to find a journalist to write about you or to spend lots of money buying some sort of advertising (tv and radio commercials, print ads, tradeshow booths, etc). The web changes everything because anyone can publish content on the web and have it read/heard/watched by thousands of people without an intermediary.

On the web, you can talk directly to buyers through your website, blog, podcasts, video, forums, wikis and other social media. But this concept also brings a new shift in thinking - now, instead of pitching and pushing your product or service at every opportunity, you must focus on your web visitors. What types of content are they interested in? What are their top problems and how can you solve them?

If you can offer content focused around those issues, you start to build trust with prospects.

Scott’s book helpfully breaks down web marketing into strategic and tactical components. On the strategic side, he explains how to define your firm’s goals, create buyer personas for your ideal clients, and develop content around your ideal clients’ goals and objectives.

From a tactical perspective, Scott spends time introducing the reader to the different types of social media from blogs and podcasts to wikis and PR distribution sites. When talking about internet marketing, it’s easy to get bogged down in jargon, but Scott keeps things non-technical and focuses on why social media marketing is so useful. The nice thing about these techniques is you don’t have to do them all - just adding one or two to your marketing plan can dramatically increase your web traffic and generate more leads and sales.

The second half of the book is devoted to harnessing the power of the new rules today. Some great tips he offers include:

• Realize that you are what you publish. This includes all your web copy, your blog posts, forum posts, podcasts, videos and pictures. You have the opportunity to publish targeted content directly for your buyers just as a magazine would publish articles for its readers.

• To become a trusted resource, you must develop thought leadership content. This means publishing content that educates your readers about their problems and concerns rather than selling your products and services directly. By doing this, you can reach prospects earlier on in their buying process, educate them so they become more savvy buyers, and start building relationships with them so when they’re ready to hire someone, they hire you.
• Use news releases to reach buyers as well as traditional journalists. When most people think of press releases, they think of writing for journalists. Instead, write directly for your prospects because they can just as easily as journalists find your news releases on the web.
• Create an online media room. Create a press room on your site where you keep track of all news releases about your company and various media like your podcasts, articles published, photos of your staff, and so on. This has been on my to-do list for quite some time.
• Get involved. Even if you aren’t ready to start your own blog, you can still get involved with the blogosphere. Start by reading influential blogs in your industry. When you feel comfortable with the different bloggers’ styles, join in the conversation by leaving comments on their blogs. Eventually, you may even feel compelled to start your own blog.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR is a great overview of web marketing. It’s filled with numerous examples and case studies and is written in a conversational that even less experienced web users can understand. The book is particularly relevant for small businesses who can’t afford to buy expensive advertising or fall under the radar of most journalists. If you want to understand how the web can help you market your products and services at minimal costs, pick up this book.

If you want to sample Scott’s stuff, check out his popular business blog, www.webinknow.com, where he offers two free downloadable ebooks, The New Rules of PR and The New Rules of Viral Marketing.

Author: Hurol Inan
Publisher: Longman
Year Published: 2002
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

If you’ve been looking for a thorough guide to website metrics, this book is it. The book is written for anyone who wants to tackle the question of ‘is my website really working?’ - from newbies unfamiliar with metrics to experienced marketers looking to measure results.

Often, people judge the success of their website by number of page views or unique visitors. Author Hurol Inan, formerly of Anderson Consulting and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, shows that these metrics are only scratching the surface and gives readers a framework for more effective measurement.

The book is broken into a number of key sections: developing a framework for measuring success, engaging customers, explaining dropouts, collecting and analyzing data, choosing the tools and vendors to use, and making sense from the results.

Fundamentally, marketers need to start with four key questions:
- How do customers arrive at your site?
- Which customers use your site?
- How do they interact with your site?

- What is the result? Do they leave happy?

Notice all questions revolve around your customers, not your company. The best metrics frameworks start with your customers - Who are they? What do they want? And how do they search for that information?

A website must reach its target audience if it is to fulfill its purpose, and this leads to a common process. All customers or potential customers go through the same stages as they engage with a website, from (i) initial attraction and recognition that the website meets their needs; to (ii) the transaction process (whether it be buying a product or exchanging information in return for a service); and, ideally, (iii) repeat transactions. Audience engagement therefore provides the common framework for measuring the success of websites.

Looking at it from the business perspective, the company works to:

1. Reach: Reach a target audience
2. Acquire: Drive their target audience to their website
3. Convert: Convert browsers into buyers (or subscriber to your newsletter or to download a guide)

4. Retain: Get people coming back

However, at each stage of the process, people drop out of the process. These dropouts can occur at each of the stages listed above:

1. Leakage: the number of window shoppers that visit your site but don’t buy (acquire stage)
2. Abandonment: Those that start to fill out your form or add products to their shopping cart but don’t complete the transaction (convert stage)
3. Attrition: former customers that no longer buy from you (retain stage)

The rest of the book deals with metrics companies can put into place to measure the dropouts at each of these stages, and some of the hot issues that come into play, such as customer privacy concerns and the costs of storing and maintaining large amounts of data.

As Inan explains his metrics framework, he uses fictitious case studies to demonstrate the principles in a mostly real world environment. The cases are somewhat generic but work well to illustrate how companies can apply and get better results from analytics.

Overall, Inan provides a logical framework for measuring your website’s success in an easy to understand format and without technical jargon. Inan does a great job of focusing on the subject matter rather than pitching his own services. My minor criticism is that at times, his presentation is a bit dry and “textbook”-like, but this is still one of the best books on the subject out there.

Author: Eric Giguere
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Year Published: 2005
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

If you’ve ever wondered how you can turn a hobby site or blog into something that makes you a few extra bucks a month, then you’ll appreciate Eric Giguere’s book, Making Easy Money With Google. Written for the complete beginner, Giguere walks you step by step through the process of building a website and adding targeted ads from Google.

The book is broken into five main sections: Starting, Content, Design, Adsense, and Traffic. In Starting, Giguere explains the four steps to building a money making website:

1) Create some web pages
2) Show ads on the pages
3) Drive traffic to the pages
4) Monitor and update the pages

He then breaks into a discussion of the different types of ads you can display on your website and how Google’s Adsense program fits into the equation. The gist is that if you have good content on your website, you can apply to become an Adsense publisher. This means you can log into Google’s website and download specific code to be placed on your website that will allow Google to display ads throughout your site. For each person that clicks on these ads, you make a few cents. At the end of the month, if enough people have clicked on your ads to equal $100 or more, Google will cut you a check. If not, the money you made for that month will roll over to the next until you make $100.

The content section of the book discusses how to pick a topic that will interest your visitors and where to find information to put on your site. The best topics fulfill some kind of need. For instance, if you’ve ever searched the web for something and couldn’t find the information you were looking for, that may be a good topic to pick. You can also look at what keywords are popular and build a site around them.

Giguere doesn’t go into detail about topics like optimizing your content for search engines but he does spend some time talking about how to gather sources for your topic and links to some legal references on copyright, plagiarism, and fair use.

Once you have a good idea about what you’re going to put on your website, it’s time to think about creating the website, choosing a good domain name, and finding a web host to host your pages. Giguere discusses each of these topics in detail, providing tips on basic html coding as well as setting up a blog.

Finally, once you have a site and content, it’s time to set up your Adsense account. Here, we finally get into the goodies that the title promised. Giguere provides a hefty tutorial on how to sign up for the service, navigate the account management console, and place ads on your website.

I have to admit that I was disappointed with this section as it basically regurgitates the information from Google’s help pages. Here, Giguere summarizes the types of ads Google offers and provides a basic tutorial on how to place the code in your html template. There’s no discussion of which types of ads pull better results or where on your site you should place the ads for higher click through rates.

Finally, the last part of the book provides some low budget ways of promoting your site to build traffic. Making money is a numbers game, so you need to drive as many people to your site as possible to increase the chances that they’ll click on your ads, thus making you money.

Much of this book is written in the form of a dialog between the author and a few of his friends which gives it a lighthearted feel that openly embraces non-technical people. Giguere does a great job limiting the techie and marketing jargon while clearly explaining each step in creating your own website. It also assumes you know nothing about building a website, publishing content, and displaying ads on your website.

My main gripe with the book is that only about a fifth of the book focuses exclusively on Google’s Adsense, so if you already have a website, this book probably isn’t for you. It also won’t help anyone that is currently using Adsense and is looking for tips to improve their click through rates (which was my main interest).

The bottom line is that yes, pretty much anyone can make money by showing ads from Google on their website. However, unless you get a lot of traffic to your website, you’re only looking at a small amount each month. This is not a get rich opportunity but if you’re willing to put in the work to create a good website or if you already have a website and want to make some money from it, Adsense may be for you.

Author: James Parker
Publisher: Wharton School Publishing
Year Published: 2007
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

If there’s one company that business authors love to talk about, it’s Southwest, the airline that gets people where they want to go for the lowest fare possible with the best customer service in the industry. The company is known for taking care of its employees and customers while turning profits for 34 straight years, including 2001.

Chances are, you’ve heard the story. Maybe you’re even a loyal Southwest customer and can tell it yourself. Yet no matter who you are, you haven’t heard the story quite the way former Southwest CEO James Parker tells it in his new book, Do The Right Thing.

Parker takes us through the turmoil of Southwest’s history from its early days battling to enter the airline industry (Texas competitor Braniff and Texas International Airlines kept the co-founders in court three years before a single plane took off), to pricing wars and their unique solution (to compete on price, Southwest offered a bottle of premium whiskey to anyone who paid full fare - a strategy that made them so popular that by the mid-1970s, they were the leading liquor distributor in Texas) to the deregulation of the skies with the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, which allowed Southwest to compete outside of Texas.

From its beginnings, Southwest was always the underdog - yet the company never gave up. They created their own formula for success based on efficiency and customer loyalty that their competitors have yet to match.

This was clearly demonstrated in how Southwest adapted post-9/11. While other airlines laid off workers, filed for bankruptcy or tried to stockpile cash reserves, Southwest remained loyal to its employees by continuing to meet payroll and even paying out their 2000 employee profit-sharing dividend on 9/14 as scheduled. For customers, Southwest offered to refund any advance ticket sales without penalty fees if customers changed their minds about flying during those uncertain times. For those who braved flights, Southwest cut prices and offered bargain fares to encourage people to fly again. Their loyalty paid off when they were the only airline to post a profit in 2001.

Much of Do The Right Thing is told in narrative format, with Parker recounting challenges and fond memories of working with the company for 25 years. For a former CEO of one of America’s most admired companies, Parker is a humble guy with a witty sense of humor. One day, he writes, as he was handing out snacks on a flight, a woman noticed his suit and asked if he was “one of those CEO types.” He jokingly replied that indeed he was the CEO, but he was a lawyer by trade so hopefully that made her think better of him.

About halfway through the book, Parker switches from telling the Southwest story to focusing on the people - and specifically, how you can create a company culture like Southwest’s. The fundamentals include having a mission everyone believes in, hiring great leaders who put others’ successes first, and finding hires that will fit well with the company culture.

While this may sound like basic business advice, Parker’s storytelling illustrates each point in ways that bland statements like “make work fun” can’t convey. For instance, he mentions a lawyer who absolutely knew she had to work for the company when she saw an employee wearing a toe ring - something taboo at her previous firm. Another hire inadvertently caused a bomb scare when she accidentally left a bag unattended while she interviewed for a pilot position. She returned to find that a bomb squad had been called in and had destroyed her breast pump. She handled the difficult (and embarrassing) situation well enough to be offered the position - and her colleagues chipped in to replace the pump.

Do The Right Thing is a quick read, with each chapter representing a core component to Southwest’s philosophy. Parker’s prose is warm and engaging, and he is able to distill complex issues into universal principles that will apply to any business manager.

Author: Seth Godin
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Year Published: 2007
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

In a world with infinite choices, how do you stand out so that clients choose you over every other choice they have? According to Seth Godin, the key is to know which projects and opportunities to focus on and which to quit. His book, The Dip, is a short, motivational guide that teaches you when to quit and when to stick it out.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “Winners never quit.” According to Godin, that’s not true. Winners quit all the time, they just quit the things that detract from their main pursuit. They don’t take up several side projects and divide their resources. Rather, they commit to pushing through the challenges and growing pains and mastering that one thing.

Why don’t many people achieve mastery?

Most people are pretty good at setting goals and/or starting projects. They get excited for a short period of time. Then, they experience one of three things: a dip (”the long slog between starting and mastery” where they realize this is going to take time and require a lot of effort), a cul-de-sac (the dead end project that never seems to move forward), or the cliff (a rare occurrence where people become addicted to something bad like cigarettes and have a difficult time quitting until something terrible happens).

The Dip is the difference between mediocrity and mastery - and chances are, for anything worth doing, there will probably be a Dip. This is especially true in business where people don’t want to hire someone who is “good enough”. They want the “best choice” as in “best for them, right now, based on what they know.”

To be “the best”, you must devote considerable time and resources to mastering whatever it is you set out to do. But the rewards are great. You’ll be a scarce resource in a marketplace of “me too” products and services. That scarcity is what makes your products and services valuable.

Unfortunately, most people quit before they make it through the dip.

They quit when the going gets tough or when they realize they don’t have the resources (money, manpower, time) required to make it through the dip. This, Godin says, is the absolute worst time to quit because you squander all the resources you’ve applied to the project - resources that could have been applied to pushing through the dip in another pursuit where you were more likely to become “the best”. Worse are the people who continue to waste resources when they’re stuck in a cul-de-sac and can’t move forward.

The biggest question readers will probably have will be “how do I know if I’m stuck in a dip or a cul-de-sac?” Godin explains that evaluating forward progress is the way to measure your success. If you aren’t moving forward and have dumped considerable resources into it, you’re probably in a cul-de-sac. If you’re making some progress, you’re probably in a dip.

To make it through the dip, you have to be extremely clear on your goals from the start and have a way to objectively measure your progress over the long term.

Since most learning curves inevitably include a string of mini-successes and failures, you’ll need to look at the overall trend - for instance, have you been able to learn from those failures/setbacks/challenges to become more successful?

In other words, it’s a matter of opportunity cost - if you have several things you could pursue, which one has the highest payout (in terms of money, happiness, etc)? To determine that, you need to set up criteria before you start that will help you evaluate along the way whether your continued persistence will pay off in the long run or whether you should quit and devote your time and energy to master something else. Otherwise, it’s much too easy to panic or become overwhelmed and quit in the middle when you experience hardships.

Illustrated by Hugh Macleod and under 100 pages, The Dip will take maybe an hour or two at most to read yet its ideas stick with you. Its premise is so simple that many people will attribute it to “common sense” and toss it aside. Yet, in the business world, common sense isn’t always so common and sometimes it takes restating the obvious many times for something to sink in.

As Godin writes, “Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.”

Author: Chip & Dan Heath
Publisher: Random House
Year Published: 2007
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

In a world of infinite choices, how do you communicate your ideas in a way that people will understand and remember what you tell them? How do you make your ideas as sticky as those urban legends about kidney heists and razor blades in Halloween candy or pseudo-facts like you only use 10% of your brain or that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from space? Or all those conspiracy theories and tales of celebrity shenanigans that spread like wildfire, regardless of if they have a grain of truth to them? That’s the key issue that brothers Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Made to Stick.

The Heaths wrote Made to Stick as a companion book to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. In that book, Gladwell addressed the concept of “The Stickiness Factor” and observed that innovations are more likely to reach the tipping point when they’re sticky. Inspired, the Heaths took that “stickiness” concept and set out to find what exactly makes some ideas stick while others disappear.

Made to Stick documents their findings - that while there is no “formula” for a sticky idea, sticky ideas come from a common set of six traits: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories. The cutesy acronym they came up with for this was a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story or SUCCESs.

Sounds easy, right? So why aren’t all ideas sticky? The problem (or villain in this tale) is the Curse of Knowledge. In other words, those telling the story assume details that the Average Joe just doesn’t know. To elaborate, the Heaths cite a study of “tappers” and “listeners” done at Stanford.

In the experiment, researcher Elizabeth Newton assigned two groups of people a role - that of a tapper or that of a listener. The tappers than had to tap out the rhythm of a well known song like Happy Birthday or The Star Spangled Banner. The listeners then had to figure out which song was being tapped. Tappers were asked ahead of time to predict the odds that listeners would guess correctly. They predicted 50%. In actuality, tappers only guessed right 2.5% - quite a discrepancy!

As tappers tapped the song, they, of course, had the song playing in their head. It was obvious to them what they were tapping to. You can’t tap Happy Birthday without hearing the melody. But listeners didn’t have that bit of knowledge, so what they hear is a bunch of disconnected taps that sound like Morse Code. Tappers were astounded by how listeners seemed to struggle when, to them, the melody was completely obvious.

And that’s the problem we all face when trying to make an idea stick. We already know why it should be sticky and find it extremely difficult to remember what life was like when we didn’t know it. But the people we’re communicating these ideas to live in that world. They can listen as much as they’d like - or we’d like them to - but they don’t hear the melody that’s playing in our heads as we tap out our ideas to them. And that’s where these six traits come into play.

The book is laid out in six chapters each focusing on one of the six traits. Each chapter contains lots of great examples and “Idea Clinics” which are practical, real-life exercises that walk you through the process of making an idea stickier. These Clinics are separate from the text so that those who want to skip them can easily do so. I found them extremely helpful, so I’d advise against skipping them.

Made to Stick is a must read for advertisers and communicators who want to create a message that spreads. It’s an entertaining, well researched read that will leave you with ideas you can put into practice immediately.

Author: Mike Moran
Publisher: IBM Press
Year Published: 2007
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

Web 2.0 marketing can be a daunting endeavor to undertake for virtually everyone but those on the bleeding edge of technology. It seems every day there’s a new technology that hits the market or a new social network opens its doors or the trends shift from blogging to audio/podcasting to video. With all those new changes, it’s easy to become obsessed with doing it right the first time, overwhelmed with all the new choices each day, and frustrated that you can’t keep up.

For those who feel they will never “get” marketing in the Web 2.0 world, Mike Moran wrote Do It Wrong Quickly. As the title suggests, Moran is a big proponent of implementing something, testing it and making improvements. Or as he says to “do it wrong quickly… then fix it, just as quickly.” Here are some key takeaways:

• Marketing must become personal and conversation driven. With so many things (ads, billboards, tv, radio, websites, games, etc) competing for your prospect’s attention, it’s much harder to get them to pay attention to you. Traditional advertising is working less because it’s based on the principle that you can interrupt your prospect and they’ll pay attention to you. Unfortunately, that mentality no longer works. People go to the kitchen when commercials come on - or if they have tivo, they just fast forward. Or perhaps they surf the web or sort through their mail or pick up a book. In other words, they have many options available and have control over which they choose. Trying to interrupt what they’re doing and get them to pay attention won’t work anymore. Instead, you must find ways to have conversations with them. They’re already talking about their interests, passions and problems. It’s up to you to join in. What would make you someone they want to talk to? How can you build an ongoing relationship with them?
• Marketing is as much about listening as it is educating. It’s no longer enough to tell prospects what you want them to know. They have their own agendas and with the web, they have a platform to tell the world what they think. You can choose to be a part of that world through offering great content, participating in blogs and forum discussions, and listening to what customers say about you - or ignore it at your company’s peril.
• Direct marketing rules the web. With the web comes accountability. Everything you do can be tested and measured, from how many clicks your Google ads get to how many people click on a particular page of your website. (Not sure what direct marketing is - read my article called What is Direct Response Advertising?)
• Design your site with your visitors’ goals in mind. User experience is everything. Once someone clicks onto your site, you have seconds to capture their attention. Everything on your site must then help your visitor find the information he or she is looking for. If your navigation is confusing or you have annoying audio or popups or if some of your links don’t work, you can easily lose your prospect’s trust. They won’t take the time to figure out how your site works when a competitor’s site is just a click away.
• Measure everything. For your web marketing campaigns to succeed, you must have specific goals that you can test. You must define what actions you want customers to take (joining your newsletter, subscribing to your RSS feed, making a product purchase, downloading a white paper, filling out your contact form, etc) and measure the frequency in which they take those actions. Once you have a benchmark for what works, try to improve it by changing the headlines and subheaders, your page’s copy, pictures and graphics, and so forth to improve how frequently visitors take a desired action.

I have to admit, when I first picked up this 375+ page book, I figured I’d skim a few chapters and get the gist. Several hours later, I found myself completely immersed. Do It Wrong Quickly is a fantastic “big picture” overview of how any business - big or small - can take advantage of the web. Moran writes in a witty, conversational tone that draws you in. He’s also a raving fan of Seth Godin, so if you’ve read any of Seth’s books (all of which I highly recommend) you’ll see influences throughout.

Moran even addresses the “this won’t work for me” and the “this won’t work where I work” crowds by addressing common demotivators that might be holding you back and by providing examples of different personality types and how you might get them to adapt to the Web 2.0 world. His descriptions of the naysayer are hysterical - yet I found myself nodding in agreement, having known someone who fell into most of his personality types. He even provides tips for getting your boss on board.

In each chapter, Moran offers tip boxes that anticipate some of the concerns you might have while reading the chapter. There are also brief summaries at the end of each chapter and an extensive 18 page glossary at the back of the book.

Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone who feels overwhelmed with the idea of marketing their business on the web. And even if you think you have a pretty good grasp on things, I bet you’ll still pick up a few handy tips.

On an additional note, Mike Moran is also the author of one of the best books on search engine marketing out there, Search Engine Marketing, Inc., which I also highly recommend and one day will probably write a full review of.

Author: Benson Smith and Tony Rutigliano
Publisher: Business Plus
Year Published: 2003
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

If you’ve read Now, Discover Your Strengths and you are in sales, check out The Gallup Organization’s book on how to Discover Your Sales Strengths. Unlike most sales books that are written from a salesman’s perspective, this book is based on Gallup research of sales people who were consistently in the top 25% of their company’s sales forces and sold 4-10 times more than average performers. The research is based on interviews with 250,000 salespeople, over 1 million customers and 80,000 managers.

If you are familiar with Now, Discover Your Strengths (which I highly recommend), you know that The Gallup Organization has put together an online assessment that tells you your top 5 talents. I, personally, thought it was pretty accurate in analyzing myself and a few of my colleagues who took the quiz. What do these talents have to do with sales? Well, interestingly - and despite what you’ve probably read - the authors conclude:

“The idea that anyone can sell is nonsense. Sales simply is not for everyone because consistent success in a sales career requires the presence of certain talents. In the course of our work we have studied sales forces for some of the best companies, companies that have carefully recruited and selected their representatives. Even in the best companies, we found that 35 percent of the sales force did not have the talents necessary to achieve acceptable results predictably. This rather considerable group - one of every three salespeople out there - is consistently in the bottom half of the performance curve.”

Discover Your Sales Strengths is written for the people that do have the potential to be great sales performers to utilize their talents and become great. What sets the best performers apart from those who are merely average? According to the authors

their use of recurring patterns to:

• Build relationships
• Have an impact on others (and get them to say yes),
• Discover and solve customer needs,
• Drive their individual performance by focusing on meaningful goals and rewards, and
• Find the right structure in which to perform at their best

When you purchase the book, you get a code to take the online StrengthsFinder assessment for free. However, knowing your top talents is on the first step. You must also find the right role that matches those strengths. And great performers usually have gifted coaches that stand by and encourage them.

In chapter 2, the authors start debunking myths of sales. Here are some findings:

• You don’t need an advanced degree
• “We only rarely find a strong correlation between experience and results.”
• Few salespeople can sell anything to everyone. Most sell well in specific environments
• There is no one right method of selling.
• Training helps those with inherent talents rather than the poor performers

Much of the first half of this book duplicates the content in Now, Discover Your Strengths, such as the explanation of strengths and talents, what the StrengthsFinder is, and how to understand your talents (”Signature Themes”). By chapter 6, however, the authors get into the meat of the book and delve into how your strengths and talents fit with your ability to sell.

There’s no one “right” combination of strengths that make up the perfect salesperson. Instead, the authors have found that top salespeople have their Signature Themes in the following 5 key areas:

• Motivation
• The way they build relationships
• The way they gain commitments
• The structure they need to get our work done, and
• Their ability to understand and solve customer needs

For each area, the authors provide examples of strengths and talents that match up with those key areas and examples of how people with specific talents utilize them. They also discuss how managers and building relationships with customers play into how well you do. It also describes the talents necessary for becoming a sales manager - and how to know if you that’s a good role for you.

If you are new to a career in sales or are unhappy with your current sales position, read this book - specifically chapters 6-8 which are extremely insightful.