Posted by Elena del Valle on March 14, 2014
Be Bold and Win the Sale
Photos: McGraw Hill, Jeff Shore
Taking action despite fear and discomfort without being manipulative or obnoxious when others would back away is what Jeff Shore advises when it comes to sales. In Be Bold and Win the Sale Get Out of Your Comfort Zone and Boost Your Performance (McGraw Hill, $20) he emphasizes that winning should reward all parties involved, and that a sale is about helping customers improve their lives.
At the end of the chapters, he features Expert Interviews in which he illustrates the point of that chapter with feedback or quotes from someone he considers an expert. For example, in the chapter on discomfort he quotes Daniel Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Pink points to a study from the University of Pennsylvania that suggests the best sales people are neither completely introverted nor extroverted but rather in the middle of the spectrum.
He also recommends finding experts who stand out when it comes to picking up and understanding the perspectives of others. Serving, by improving someone’s life, Pink believes, is lacking the most in today’s sales world.
The 261-page softcover book published this year is divided into three parts and 15 chapters. Part One, Dealing with Discomfort, features: “Well, This is Awkward,” Getting Your Inner Boldness On, That Nagging Squirminess, Story Time, and The Gut Check.
Part Two, Developing Boldness, features: Let’s Do This Thing!, The Boldness Network, Retraining Your Brain, Big Problems in Little Packages, Handling the “Gotchas,” The Advanced Course, and Go! Part Three, Putting It All to Work, features: The Customer’s Mission, The Customer’s Mission, The Customer’s Mission, and Putting It All Together.
Jeff Shore, author, Be Bold and Win the Sale
Shore, founder and president, Shore Consulting, Inc., is fellow of the National Speakers Association’s Million Dollar Roundtable.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on February 28, 2014
Basics of Branding
Photos: The Pathfinder Group
Not all brands are created equally. Some pass unnoticed and fade into oblivion while others linger in our minds for years or longer. What makes the difference? Powerful brands are different, compelling, and relevant enough to truly excite the minds and hearts — and wallets — of their customers. That is what Jay Gronlund, a business development consultant, believes. In his new book Basics of Branding: A Practical Guide for Managers (Business Expert Press, $43.95) he explains how readers can create an emotional connection with their customers that results in sustainable brand loyalty and steady revenue growth. The book is also available in digital format for $19.95.
“Yes, definitely. The principles behind branding are relevant for all types of businesses, big or small, product or service,” Gronlund said by email in response to a question about the relevance of branding regardless of size of the company. “Brand positioning starts with defining and thoroughly understanding your target customer. Most start-ups are preoccupied with their new product or service, and don’t pay enough attention to addressing what their potential customers want, especially from an emotional standpoint. Branding is basically about creating a relationship with a customer, and it has been proven by neuroscientists that emotions have the most influence on human behavior, including purchase decisions.”
The 194-page softcover book with tables and illustrations published in 2013 is divided into six chapters: What Is Branding Really About?; The Positioning Statement, Emotions and Brand Equity; Branding Applications; Building Strong Bonds; Branding in the B2B World, New Opportunities; Marketing Today: Branding for Digital Marketing and Social Media. Gronlund proposes that it is critical to begin with a “message or impression that forges a bond of trust with that customer.”
One thing to remember about branding? “Branding is all about forming a connection with your customer, ideally one based on experience and emotions that make that customer trust that brand,” he said by email.
Jay Gronlund, author, Basics of Branding
When asked about developing a brand for an intangible such as an author he said: “A service, while not as concrete as a product, still requires good branding, since both must make a promise (i.e. the benefit) to a target audience, supported by credible reasons to believe this promise. Ultimately, a customer will become interested in a service, and buy it, only if they feel emotionally (and rationally) that such a service will add some value to their lives and make them more happy and satisfied. Any author, for fiction or non-fiction, should try to brand him or herself, so that the author’s (brand) name will mean something special to prospective readers. Ideally building a bond with his/her audience is based on trust, plus the expectation that each time he/she will learn and/or be entertained. The brand impression the author provides should be distinct, relevant and tailored to the unique characteristics of his/her storytelling, content/subject matter, and flair for offering something new and creative.”
Gronlund has held senior positions at Richardson-Vicks, Church & Dwight, Seagrams, and Newsweek. In 1990, he started The Pathfinder Group, a boutique business development consulting firm specializing in cross-border marketing; re-positioning brands; facilitating ideation sessions; and con- ducting workshops overseas. In 1999, he created a course on positioning and brand development for New York University he still teaches today.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on February 7, 2014
Peruvian Power Foods
Photos: Health Communications, Inc.
Manuel Villacorta, MS, RD, CSSD dedicated two years to researching particularly nutritious foods, traveling to his native Peru to connect with chefs, farmers, food bloggers, fishermen, and people in general about that country’s indigenous foods. As part from his journey of discovery the dietician with 16 years of experience created 100 recipes and took 2,000 photos many of which are featured in Peruvian Power Foods: 18 Superfoods, 101 Recipes, and Anti-aging Secrets from the Amazon to the Andes (Health Communications, Inc. $18.95), a 310-page paperback book he wrote with the help of coauthor Jamie Shaw, a writer, branding specialist and recipe creator. The recipe examples include breakfast granola with lucuma, white bean hummus with sacha inchi, pichuberry muffins, maca shake, and truffles with cacao and camu camu.
“The reception has been great. Peruvian cuisine is a hot topic at the moment,” Villacorta said by email in response to a question about the public acceptance to his new book published October 2013. “Chefs are heralding the cuisine with the enthusiasm they once reserved for France. Peruvian restaurants are popping up in major cities everywhere. On his Parts Unknown program, Anthony Bourdain dubbed Peru’s cuisine one of the most underrated in the world. Clearly, something was happening in my home country. And while it’s partially due to the innovative preparations and exciting cross-cultural dishes being developed, Peru is also home to thousands of foods found nowhere else on the planet, many of which are staggering in their content of potent nutrients. As a native Peruvian, I felt there was no better time than the present to share my knowledge about the foods that originate from the region. And as a registered dietitian, I was interested in the health properties of these foods. This book helped me marry the two, health and cooking.”
Manuel Villacorta, MS, author, Peruvian Power Foods
The book highlights 18 foods believed to be particularly high in nutrient value. They are pichuberry, maca, cacao, kiwicha, avocado, aji, camu camu, purple corn, artichokes, sacha inchi, lucuma, beans, purple potatoes, cilantro, papaya, yacon, quinoa, and sweet potatoes. Each food section features nutritional aspects, culinary uses, and recipes.
“Yes. Moreover, I’m especially finding the Latino population to be very receptive, and have been asked on many occasions, if the book will be translated into Spanish,” the nutritionist said when asked about the popularity of the book among immigrant families.
While some like artichokes, cilantro, sweet potatoes, beans and avocado are easy to find many others are not prevalent in supermarkets. Fresh pichuberries, for example, seem particularly challenging to find. In Appendix B and by email in response to a question about how to purchase the ingredients for the recipes he said: “Latino markets and/or regular supermarkets like Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Safeway, and Vons. Brands used in the book were Sacha Vida, Navitas, Barry Farm, and Bobs Red Mill.”
Villacorta is also author of Eating Free: The Carb-Friendly Way to Lose Inches, Embrace Your Hunger, and Keep the Weight off for Good. He served as a national media spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. He is a health blog contributor to The Huffington Post, an on-air contributor to Univision, and a health and lifestyle contributor for Fox News Latino. He owns a San Francisco-based private practice.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on January 8, 2014
Adversaries into Allies
Photos: Bob Burg
Bob Burg believes that being successful in life and in business is the result of having technical and people skills. Ninety percent of the success comes from people skills and only ten percent from technical skills, according to him. He says that there are many highly talented people in the world who only achieve average results because they lack good people skills.
In Adversaries into Allies: Win People Over Without Manipulation or Coercion (Portfolio, $26.95), published in 2013, Burg explores the path to influence by converting adversaries into partners. It’s his opinion that persuasion need not be about winners and losers. He proposes an approach that results in mutual benefit rather than one that leaves the other person feeling taken advantage of which in turn might produce resistance and a negative attitude.
The 250-page hardcover book is divided into 76 chapters and six main sections: The Five Principles of Ultimate Influence, Control Your Own Emotions, Understand the Clash of Belief Systems, Acknowledge Their Ego, Set the Proper Frame, Communicate with Tact and Empathy, and The Character of Ultimate Influencers.
Bob Burg, author, Adversaries into Allies
He defines Ultimate Influence as the ability to get the results you want from others while making them feel genuinely good about themselves, the process, and about you. One of the ways to do that, he says, is for people to control their own emotions. Such control allows them to help their adversaries be open to the ideas they propose. He stresses that to avoid confusion it’s important to understand that we all follow an unconscious set of beliefs based on experiences and ideas which vary from one person to another.
Helping people feel good about themselves helps the influencer make an ally, according to Burg. Approaching a conflict from a position of benevolence, resolution, and helpfulness increases the likelihood that an adversary will follow the influercer’s lead; and communicating with tact and empathy at the right time can go a long way to win someone over, he says.
Burg is coauthor of The Go-Giver, Go Givers Sell More, and It’s Not About You, and the author of Endless Referrals. According to promotional materials, The Go-Giver was a BusinessWeek and The Wall Street Journal bestseller and has been translated into twenty languages. Together, his books have sold more than a million copies. A speaker, Burg presents to corporations and associations internationally, including Fortune 500 companies, franchises and direct sales organizations.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on December 20, 2013
Wealthy by Design
Photo: Kimberly Foss
Kimberly Foss, CFP, CPWA, rose from a home with “financially challenged parents” to become the president and founder of Empyrion Wealth Management, which according to promotional materials, was named one of the nation’s top wealth managers by Bloomberg’s Wealth Manager Magazine. In Wealthy by Design (Greenleaf Book Group Press ebook), published June 2013, she shares some of her life story and wealth management ideas. She assumes readers will rely on a financial planner who will work with them based on their goals, risk taking preferences, equity and age.
She explains that there are two primary types of financial advising services, consultative and transactional. The former focus on client goals and needs and charge based on the number of assets they manage for a given client while the latter recommend products for which they earn commissions. In Appendix A, she provides readers questions to ask a prospective adviser. In Appendix B, she offers six allocation strategies for portfolios. In the ebook edition, it was challenging to read the graphics as displayed on the tablet reader.
In her book, she outlines the importance of understanding personal financial drivers before making long term investment decisions. She strives to demonstrate to readers how following five foundational principles of investing can lead to wealth management based on individual goals and circumstances. The principals are: Goal Setting, Planning, Commitment, Assessment, and Flexibility. The book is divided into an Introduction, a chapter each for the principles, and a Conclusion as well as two appendices. She relies on case studies and anecdotes to illustrate her points. For example, she describes a risk averse client for whom she organized, thanks to her banking relationships, a 15-year CD.
Kimberly Foss, author, Wealthy by Design
She touts the importance of focusing on the best interests of clients, the relationship between asset allocation strategy and the success of a portfolio, and portfolio diversification. An investor’s approach to building wealth, she says in the Conclusion, should be considered with care, planned, reviewed and never random.
Foss has 26 years of financial services experience. She is a member of the Investment Management Consultants Association.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on November 15, 2013
QR Codes Kill Kittens
Photos: Wiley
A quick response code or QR code for short is a type of bar code that requires a smart phone and an app to read it. According to Wikipedia, it is a kind of two-dimensional barcode that can be read optically by a machine. It is used to read information. If the app is able to read the QR code it was made correctly. Once the app reads the code it should lead the user to a mobile device friendly link or website.
QR codes have become common marketing tools, appearing on products, billboards, bus stops and so forth. The problem, according to Scott Stratten, president of UnMarketing, is that most QR codes don’t work. He believes it is because many people are too focused on using codes without paying enough attention to functionality. He proposes that if it mattered people would make sure they worked when they launch them.
Scott Stratten, author, QR Codes Kill Kittens
“If you knew that your terrible business decisions could cost a kitten its life, would you still do it? Of course not. No one wants to hurt a kitten, and no one wants to damage their own business through easily avoidable mistakes. The trick is, knowing which things are the wrong things to do,” Stratten said.
To make his point he wrote QR Codes Kill Kittens: How to Alienate Customers, Dishearten Employees, and Drive Your Business into the Ground (Wiley, $18), a 196-page hardcover small book focused on what goes wrong when QR codes don’t work.
The four color book is easy to read and often humorous. It includes photos on almost every page. It is divided into four sections designed to showcase why QR codes represent what’s wrong with business today including; They Don’t Work, Nobody Likes Them, They are Selfish and They Take Up Valuable Time Better Spent Elsewhere. Stratten, ranked among the top online influencers by Forbes.com, is also author of Unmarketing.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on November 8, 2013
Lost Luggage
Photos: Atria Books / Marble Arch Press
Jordi Punti, a writer and translator, and a contributor to the Spanish and Catalan press, was rewarded with recognition when he released his first novel. Lost Luggage (Atria Books / Marble Arch Press, $16), published in English in paperback and e-book editions in October 2013, was translated into 15 languages, and won the Spanish National Critics’ and the Catalan Booksellers prizes. Prior to this title Punti published three books of shorts stories.
In the 440-page book, Cristofol, a young Barcelona resident, is informed by the police that his father’s flat has been abandoned and its owner is missing. The man who vanished, a truck driver, left Cristofol and his mother 20 years earlier. At the apartment he had never heard about Cristofol finds a list of names belonging to his half brothers Christof, Christophe, and Christopher. He contacts them. None of them was aware that he had half siblings from a common father. None of them had seen his father in many years.
Jordi Punti, author, Lost Luggage
Although they live in different European cities they decide to meet for the first time. They wonder why he abandoned them and why they have similar names. In their journey to find the answers they discover a man who during 30 years of driving was able to escape the darkness of Spain under its former president Francisco Franco and to explore Europe.
Since he received a degree in Romance Philology in 1991, Punti has worked in Barcelona publishing houses, and co-directed La Flor Inversa (The Inverse Flower), a collection of medieval poetry along with Jordi Cerdà and Eduard Vilella, according to lletra.net.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on November 1, 2013
The Year Without Pants
Photos: Jossey-Bas
Scott Berkun, a Microsoft veteran with a corporate background who had authored four books, wondered whether he would follow his own advice if he were back in the workforce trenches. An opportunity to test his theory arrived when he was invited to lead a team of programmers at WordPress.com from 2010 to 2012. He agreed on condition that as a participatory journalism exercise he would write about his experience and the lessons he learned.
In The Year Without Pants and the Future of Work (Jossey-Bass, $26.95), he outlines the highlights of the experience as he saw them. He includes a behind the scenes look at Automattic, the firm he thinks drives WordPress.com’s success. The 258-page hardcover book published in 2013 is divided into 24 chapters.
His biggest challenge the author said by email was that “As an expert I had to put my expertise to the test, and find out: what of my own advice do I practice? And how will I adjust to a workplace with no email and no offices?”
Scott Berkun, author, The Year Without Pants
Every month 396 million people view more than 14 billion pages in 120 languages at WordPress.com. As of this writing, there are 72 million blogs around the world; users produce 36 million new posts and 62 million comments per month, according to the company website. He believes other businesses can take advantage of the insights he gleaned first hand from working there.
“I learned the future of work can be wonderful if managers are willing to reevaluate what’s possible, based on the examples WordPress.com has provided,” he said when asked what was the biggest reward he received from the project.
In the book, he explores workplace issues at WordPress.com such as how he thinks the company’s decentralized workplace, relying on 170 employees in 70 different cities, is creative and productive. He draws attention to the company’s “culture of self-sufficiency and experimentation.”
And he considers how the use of blogs, chat and Skype in lieu of email to communicate make it efficient. It’s possible, he says in the final chapter, that technology companies like Automattic are returning work to its roots and away from the absurdity of work that exists in many white collar environments; and that they might return some of the meaning of work the business world has lost.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on October 25, 2013
Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results
Photos: Drew Boyd, Jacob Goldenberg
Innovation is likely when working in a familiar world with tools that foster our creativity, say Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg. They’re convinced inventive methods follow common patterns or Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) in use, according to them, by hundreds of companies. They also believe creativity is a skill anyone can learn and perfect.
In Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results (Simon & Schuster, $28.50), a 257-page hardcover book published this year, they outline their approach and the characteristics of SIT.
“Research has shown that just telling people to ‘think outside the box’ does not improve their creative output. It does not give people the cognitive instructions how to generate an idea,” said Goldenberg by email in response to the question of thinking outside versus inside the box. “Instead, it prompts people to stray far away from the problem in unconstrained ways. This is both inefficient and highly unlikely to generate a creative solution. On the other hand, research shows conclusively that constraining one’s thinking, inside the box, with fewer options and tight boundaries prompts far more creative output than unconstrained thinking. Limiting the brain’s options makes it work harder to find a creative solution.”
The book project took two years to complete while development of the SIT lasted four years, and the work in the field took more than 12 years, he explained. In the book, the authors discuss five problem solving techniques: Division, Subtraction, Multiplication, Task Unification and Attribute Dependency. By removing something that had previously been thought essential a product or service may be adapted for a new use, according to the Subtraction technique. By dividing a component out of an existing product or service that initially seemed not to function it may be possible to transform it into something productive, according to the Division tecnique.
In Multiplication, a part of a product is copied after being modified. Bringing tasks together into one component of a service or product is Task Unification. Usually the component had been previously thought to be unrelated to the task. When two or more attributes initially thought unrelated are brought together successfully there is Attribute Dependency, the authors say.
Rather than start with a problem and seek solutions they suggest the opposite. “Let me tell you a secret: consumers don’t care if the problem was defined first and then a solution was found, or the opposite way. All they care about is if they have a new solution to a meaningful problem,” said Goldenberg.
Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg
“However, the latter direction is much more effective for creative (only creative) ideation. Psychology researcher Ronald Finke and his colleagues discovered that people hold inside their head an ambiguous, pre-inventive form the instant before generating an idea. People essentially start with a configuration in their head and then seek ways to make that configuration useful. They called it Function Follows Form. They also concluded that people are better at this direction of thinking. They are better at searching for benefits for a given configuration (starting with a solution) than they are finding the best configuration for a given benefit (starting with the problem). The method, SIT, structures your creative thought processes to first create these configurations in your head, and then it leads you to find a benefit for that configuration. Done properly, you end up with a creative idea.”
Boyd is executive director, Master of Science in Marketing Program, and assistant professor, marketing and innovation, University of Cincinnati. Prior to that he worked for Johnson & Johnson, United Airlines and was an officer in the United States Air Force. He dedicates his time to the fields of innovation, persuasion, and social media.
Goldenberg is professor, marketing, School of Business Administration, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and visiting professor, Columbia Business School and the Interdisciplinary Center-Herzliya (IDC). His research focuses on creativity, new product development, diffusion of innovation, complexity in market dynamics, and social network effects. The company he established with his partners, which created the SIT system, works with more than one hundred companies worldwide, from the United States to Argentina to Kazakhstan.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on October 11, 2013
Capture the Mindshare and the Market Share Will Follow
Some people are brand loyal because they believe that those brands provide them with extraordinary value that cannot be acquired any other way. That is how Libby Gill, a Los Angeles management consultant, sees the relationship between consumers and brands. She says that the most successful brands are carefully built by people who are meticulous about getting certain things right.
In Capture the Mindshare and the Market Share Will Follow: The Art and Science of Building Brands (Palgrave MacMillan, $26), a 240-page hardcover book published this year, she explains her thinking. When she writes about mindshare she’s referring to the heads, trust, loyalty and hearts of a company’s customers.
In the book, she promises readers a blueprint for deep and lasting connections for executives, entrepreneurs, leaders and those who seek to influence, sell, persuade or attract customers. She defines branding as the ability to maintain an on going connection through awareness of value that drives others to act and create loyalty born of hope, trust and respect.
She describes seven elements she sees as necessary for the creation of the powerful company client relationships that generates customer loyalty and promotes economic success among successful brands. The elements are: Clarify Customer Benefits, Commit to Your Customer, Collaborate with Your Customer, Connect with Your Customer, Compete with Your Competition, Communicate with Confidence and Certainty, and Contribute to the Community.
An executive coach and branding expert with over 20 years of industry experience, Gill is the former head of communications and public relations for Sony, Universal, and Turner Broadcasting. Her clients include ABC-Disney, Nike, PayPal, Warner Brothers, and Wells Fargo. Her previous books are Traveling Hopefully: How to Lose Your Family Baggage and Jumpstart Your Life, and You Unstuck: Mastering the New Rules of Risk-taking in Work and Life.
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