Greatest Hits Blog

The one-sentence summary
Selling is no longer solely the domain of salespeople, because we are all trying to move each other in some way or another.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS
• One in nine Americans work in sales, but so do the other eight. We are all in sales now – trying to ‘move’ others to our point of view.
• ‘Non-sales selling’ involves persuading or convincing others to give up something they’ve got in exchange for what we’ve got, and we now spend 40% of our time doing it.
• The forces behind this are:
1. Entrepreneurship: ironically fuelled by the very technologies that were supposed to destroy salespeople (so-called ‘disintermediation’ never happened.
2. Elasticity: most of our skills now stretch across many boundaries
3. Ed-Med: the fastest growing industries around the world are education and healthcare – both require constant selling
• The old asymmetry, whereby the salesperson knew more than the customer, no longer applies. Instead of caveat emptor, it is now a case of caveat vendor – seller beware.
• The ABC of moving others is no longer ‘Always Be Closing’ – it’s now:
Attunement: being in harmony with groups, individuals, and contexts (taking another person’s perspective)
Buoyancy: grittiness of spirit and ‘sunniness’ of outlook equals resilience
Clarity: finding problems and defining them to make sense of murky situations is more important then just solving them
• There are many facets to achieving these qualities, including ‘interrogative self-talk’ (talking to yourself in a motivating way), drawing discussion maps to see who is talking and listening most, and finding genuine problems to solve rather than just solving what’s in front of you.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT
• If you want to succeed at sales, you need to pitch, be prepared to improvise, and serve (you are serving your customer).
• Pitch techniques include: reduce the thought to one word; pose a question; make the theme rhyme (it’s more memorable); state it in under 140 characters (like Twitter).
• Try the “Pixar pitch” (named after the animation company), by telling your story in this formula: “Once upon a time A. Every day B. One day C. Because of that D. Because of that E. Until finally F.”
• The best salespeople are neither extraverts nor introverts – they are ambiverts* – a bit of each. *This is not a made up word – it has been in the literature since the 1920s.
• To understand a complex sales situation, you need to envisage a mental map of all those involved – a form of social cartography.
• A good way to dramatise this is to use Jeff Bezos’s “Pull up a chair” philosophy – he insists on having an empty chair at every meeting to remind everyone what the customer view might be.
• The way things are framed influences the likelihood of a sale: try offering less, labelling options differently, pointing out the pitfalls rather than just the benefits, explaining the potential, and offering an easy launch pad to get the thing done (something the author calls an ‘off-ramp’).
• Good selling involves agitation rather than irritation – identify the 1% question that’s important, and the rest will fall into place.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH
• Nothing. It’s a really good read – succinct, lucid, and well-researched.

The one-sentence summary

Much of what marketers believe to be true is wrong, but clear laws do exist to help.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• There is a lot that marketers don’t know, and here are the laws that are vital:

Double jeopardy law: brands with less market share have so because they have far fewer buyers, and they are less loyal (so the brand is hit twice)

Retention double jeopardy: all brands lose some buyers and the loss is proportionate to their market share (big brands lose more but it’s a smaller proportion of their base)

Pareto law, 60/20: a bit more than half a brand’s sales come from the top 20% – the rest come from the bottom 80% (so it’s not 80/20)

Law of buyer moderation: heavy buyers buy less in the period after they were classified as such and the converse may be true of light buyers (there is regression to the mean even when there is no real change in behaviour)

Natural monopoly law: brands with more market share attract a greater proportion of light category buyers

User bases seldom vary: rival brands sell to very similar customer bases

Attitudes and brand beliefs reflect behavioural loyalty: consumers know and say more about brands they use more often, so big brands always have higher survey scores

Usage drives attitude: attitudes and perceptions are very similar across brands

Law of prototypicality: image attributes that describe the category score higher – distinctiveness is more important than differentiation

Duplication of purchase law: a brand’s customer base overlaps with that of others in line with their market share

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• It’s fun to read a calm, academic destruction of some of the marketing greats. Those who get it in the neck for peddling ‘esoteric quackery’ include:

Fred Reichheld (inventor of the Net Promoter Score): customer retention is not the key to improved profits, the author says.

Philip Kotler: target marketing and segmentation don’t work.

Kevin Roberts: Lovemarks are humorous twaddle invented after too much wine.

Al Ries: wrongly predicted that the iPhone would only be a niche product.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• The NBD-Dirichlet is effectively impenetrable to the layperson. It refers to a Negative Binomial Distribution, and is named after Johan Dirichlet. It remains pretty much unexplained, and further research at marketingscience.info sheds little further light on the matter.
• The author is Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, so most of the material comes from there.

The one-sentence summary

Work as hard as you can to make everything as simple as it can possibly be.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Subtitled The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success, this is a paean to simplicity written by the man who named the iMac.
• He outlines ten ways to operate that yield excellent results:

1. Think brutal: this is the equivalent of the Saatchi’s brutal simplicity of thought approach
2. Think small: small groups and meetings get more done
3. Think minimal: just communicate one thing, otherwise people won’t get it
4. Think motion: momentum is crucial to projects, so don’t let them last too long or they fizzle out
5. Think iconic: find a conceptual image that captures the essence of what you are trying to do
6. Think phrasal: use short simple words and don’t confuse people with complication
7. Think casual: big company thinking and process doesn’t work well
8. Think human: be true to your feelings and treat audiences naturally
9. Think sceptic: expect the first reaction of others to be negative when you are trying to be radically different
10. Think war: extreme times call for extreme measures (debatable and rather macho, this one)

…all embodied in the grammatically infuriating endline Think Different.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• There’s plenty of good advice here. Clarity of thought, small teams, pacey timings, and pithy expression are all to be applauded.
• The old story of throwing a ball of paper at someone is used. They catch the one, but drop all five if thrown more than one. Tennis balls and other items are often cited in a story extolling the virtue of one message over many.
• Recycling leadership is a decent idea – create the revolution, and then invent your next one while competitors are playing catch up.
• Waving the Simple Stick is a metaphor for taking the complexity out of as much as possible, usually by asking how this can be made simpler.
• The quality of the work increases in direct proportion to the degree of involvement by the ultimate decision maker – laudable, but perhaps not easy in most big companies.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• As ever, if it were this easy, everyone would be doing it. Of course it’s not easy, and the author does point this out.
• Steve Jobs was a polarising individual and some might find much of this narrative rather sycophantic – it would seem there’s a fine line between being an inspirational leader and a bit of a tyrant.
• It’s easy enough to nod along to most of the wisdom here, but in truth it could probably have been said in a blog.

The one-sentence summary

Marketing and marketers play a critical role in creating the customer value and demand that leads to growth, so it’s not enough for the marketing department to be organised effectively – the whole company needs to be.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• The book claims to be the definitive guide to transforming marketing capabilities.
• Marketing and marketers play a critical role in creating the customer value and demand that leads to growth. It’s not enough for the marketing department to be organised effectively to create better customer value – the whole company needs to be.
• The core disciplines and practices of effective marketing are explained, along with how an organisation can transform itself using them.
• Their 3D approach involves Defining strategy, Developing solutions, and Driving embedding.
• The Growth Propeller is a process for getting all this done:

~ The Outer Ring involves business objectives and performance, segmentation and portfolio strategy, brand positioning and architecture, innovative value propositions, integrated communications, route-to-market, and customer experience delivery.

~ The Connecting Ring involves strategy and planning.

~ The Inner Core involves insight and engagement.

• The Training Trap is where companies focus on individual skill development and fail to wire the marketing function into the organisation.
• The Brand Learning Wheel shows how to drive marketing capability through processes, skills, organisation, people, and culture.
• Learning occurs 70% on the job, 20% from feedback and role models, and just 10% from formal learning programmes.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• Marketing with a big M typically operates at the functional level, and with a small m at the company level.
• To get your company growing do you want to lift the floor (ensure consistent best practice) or raise the ceiling (stretch capabilities)?
• Five star marketing leaders have a restless customer obsession, a bold and inspiring vision, are humble, honest, and have great attention to detail.
• There are many Measurement Traps, including marketing = communications (it doesn’t); art v. science (creativity shouldn’t triumph over analytics); data v. insight (the former is useless without the latter); time lags (data cannot be acted upon if it’s too late); and commercial knowledge (huge numbers of marketing papers involve basic miscalculations and misunderstandings of fundamental concepts such as margin and ROI).
• Consensus seems to be emerging that instead of people making decisions in the sequence of feel, think, do, actual behaviour seems to be based more on a model of feel, do, post-rationalise.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• To any experienced marketer, it’s all a bit obvious.
• Perhaps not surprisingly, the book is obsessed with growth.

The one-sentence summary

Strategic visual tools can help simplify any problem and suggest steps towards a decent decision.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• The authors have gathered together fifty models for strategic thinking in one small book. Whether you need to plan a presentation, assess someone’s business idea or just get to know yourself better, the visual tools will help simplify any problem and suggest steps towards a decent decision.
• There is a wide range of material, from MBA courses and lighter business reading to personal improvement.
• In one diagram that performs the role of the contents page, they show how the models cover me v. others and thinking v. doing, which generates four quadrants: how to improve (myself/others), and how to understand better (myself/others). Highlights from each section are:
• Improve yourself: the Eisenhower priority matrix, the rubber band model (what is holding or pulling you?), the feedback model ((advice, compliment, criticism, suggestion), and the conflict resolution model (flight, fight, give up, evade responsibility, compromise, reach a consensus).
• Understand yourself better: the flow model (under/over challenged, or ‘in the flow’?), the Johari Window (what I know about others and what they know about me), the energy model (are you memory-, dream-, or reality-driven?), and the personal performance model (have to, able to, want to).
• Understand others better: the Swiss cheese model (in the analogy, mistakes only happen when all the holes in every slice line up and something slips through the layers), double loop learning (learning properly from your mistakes), long tails and black swans.
• Improve others: the Hersey-Blanchard model of situational leadership (adapt your approach from instruct to coach, support, delegate), and the Drexler-Sibbet team performance model 9they never seem to have normal names do they?). This one takes you from orientation to renewal in 7 steps.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• You should be able to select a model for almost any situation to provide a different perspective, or to get some structure round all the variables.
• There is a “Now it’s your turn” section at the back that encourages you to draw a range of possible solutions. Most models are inherently visual, and the authors believe it is good to draw while you talk, and use pictures to articulate what words cannot.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• You need to keep an eye on the old chestnuts and decide whether they are any good, not very helpful, or just plain overused: SWOT analysis, Maslow’s pyramids, thinking outside the box, the Pareto principle (80:20) rule, de Bono’s hats, and several others.