The Marketing Book Podcast

Nincompoopery: Why Your Customers Hate You--and How to Fix It by John Brandt Click here for show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/nincompoopery-john-brandt Find and kill the corporate stupidity that drives customers crazy. CEO and award-winning business writer John R. Brandt offers concrete examples of how any organization--large or small, and regardless of industry--can innovate in ways that delight customers and attract top-level talent. Nincompoopery--terrible customer service, idiotic business processes, and soul-crushing management practices--surrounds all of us. We lose time, patience, and profits as stuck-in-the-past organizations actively prevent us (and our customers) from getting the value we (and they) deserve.  Can’t anybody change this? CEO and award-winning business writer John R. Brandt says we can. In Nincompoopery: Why Your Customers Hate You--And How to Fix It, he leverages research across thousands of companies to show leaders how to find and kill the corporate stupidity that drives customers crazy. More importantly, he offers concrete examples of how any organization--large or small, and regardless of industry--can innovate in ways that delight customers and attract top-level talent. Brandt has worked with hundreds of companies to help them outwit competitors, and in the blunt (and funny) Nincompoopery, he shares his unique blueprint for success. It usually starts by asking a simple question or two, such as Why should our customers have to rekey their data multiple times to make a single purchase? Why are there four levels of approval just to order basic supplies? Why can’t we get qualified candidates for open positions, or provide new employees with decent training? In short: How did we become such nincompoops? And when will we stop?  Nincompoopery offers leaders the answers they need--and the profits they crave--with a scoop of humor on the side. Enjoy!

FRICTION―The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage by Roger Dooley Click here for show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/friction-roger-dooley In 2016, $4.6 trillion of merchandise was left in abandoned e-commerce shopping carts.    Every year, the U.S. economy loses $3 trillion dollars in productivity due to excess bureaucracy.    Red tape and over-complicated licenses have contributed to China’s GDP exceeding India’s by $82 trillion over the span of just three decades.   If you’re a business leader, these statistics should give you nightmares. According to science-based marketing and business expert Roger Dooley, they illustrate the real and growing threat of “friction,” which he defines as the unnecessary expenditure of time, effort, or money in performing a task.    In today's high-speed, customer-empowered world, the levels of swiftness and efficiency of business transactions will determine ultimate success or failure. In this groundbreaking guide, Dooley helps you spot the inevitable points of friction in your organization, and he provides the tools and insight you need to eliminate them. By truly understanding the impact friction can have, you’ll be able to establish positive habits and eliminate negative ones―all with the end result of building a company that’s the envy of your industry. Friction takes you step-by-step through the process of:   •Empowering frank conversations •Guiding individual and team behaviors •Getting ahead of friction  •Optimizing the customer experience  •Building a frictionless corporate culture   Combining scientific research with real-life examples of leaders who have conquered business friction, Dooley teaches you how to identify roadblocks, alter them for the benefit of both business and customer, and create positive, lasting change.   If you’re in a leadership position, now is the time to declare war on friction―before your competitors do. Stamp out ridiculous rules, pointless procedures, and meaningless meetings. Become a relentless advocate for the customer and for minimizing customer effort. Lubricate every point of friction and make your company run like a well-oiled machine.    Friction provides the know-how you need to lead your company to industry dominance.

From Impossible to Inevitable: How SaaS and Other Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue 2nd Edition by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin  Click here for show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/impossible-inevitable-2nd-edition-aaron-ross Break your revenue records with Silicon Valley’s “growth bible” “This book makes very clear how to get to hyper-growth and the work needed to actually get there” Why are you struggling to grow your business when everyone else seems to be crushing their goals? If you needed to triple revenue within the next three years, would you know exactly how to do it? Doubling the size of your business, tripling it, even growing ten times larger isn't about magic. It's not about privileges, luck, or working harder. There's a template that the world's fastest growing companies follow to achieve and sustain much, much faster growth. From Impossible to Inevitable details the hypergrowth playbook of companies like Hubspot, Salesforce.com (the fastest growing multibillion dollar software company), and EchoSign—aka Adobe Document Services (which catapulted from $0 to $144 million in seven years). Whether you have a $1 billion or a $100,000 business, you can use the same insights as these notable companies to learn what it really takes to break your own revenue records. Pinpoint why you aren’t growing faster Understand what it takes to get to hypergrowth Nail a niche (the #1 missing growth ingredient) What every revenue leader needs to know about building a scalable sales team There’s no time like the present to surpass plateaus and get off of the up-and-down revenue rollercoaster. Find out how now!

Leadership in Focus: Bringing Out Your Best on Camera by Vern Oakley Click here for show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/leadership-focus-vern-oakley If a message feels important enough for video, it's likely because you want to move the audience to action potential investors to take a stake in your company, current employees to embrace a new initiative, prospective employees to bring their talents to your organization.  Your video can help you inspire your tribe the people you want to influence to take action. But if you want them to do more than listen, your audience needs to feel an authentic connection with you.  Veteran filmmaker Vern Oakley offers strategies that can help you relax and be their best, authentic self in front of the camera. The return on investment will be a stronger connection to those you want to reach; heightened respect, prestige, and interest in their organization; a stronger brand; and a longer-lasting legacy.  Leadership in Focus is a comprehensive, entertaining guide for leaders who realize that it's not just what you say on camera that's important it's how you say it. Whether a CEO, middle manager, or budding entrepreneur making YouTube videos to influence their tribe, this book will help them rally others around a message.

Fire Them Now: The 7 Lies Digital Marketers Sell...And the Truth about Political Strategies that Help Businesses Win by Phillip Stutts Click here for show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/fire-them-now-phillip-stutts Your digital marketing firm is failing your business, not delivering on the kind of passion, commitment, and innovation they promised. To ensure that you're getting the best, you need to know how to demand better--by learning from the incredible strategies of the fast-paced arena of political marketing. In Fire Them Now, Phillip Stutts illuminates common failures within the digital marketing industry and explores the strategies and tactics used in politics that win for businesses. He examines why political marketers are producing some of the most successful marketing in the game--working with limited budgets and tight deadlines while demonstrating unwavering work ethic, adaptability, and proactivity. This eye-opening guide offers a new pathway for businesses to succeed in an ever-changing economy, providing the tools you'll need to challenge your current digital marketing agency. And if they can't deliver the win, Fire Them Now!

The Art and Skill of Sales Psychology: Why Buyers and Sellers Do What They Do by Brad McDonald Click here for show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/art-skill-sales-psychology-brad-mcdonald The ART AND SKILL OF SALES PSYCHOLOGY lays out, in accessible terms that any sales professional can understand, how to identify and learn from the psychological motivators that cause buyers and sellers to do what they do. The book offers clarity and control over the sales process to salespeople, and powerful insights on coaching to managers. This book is a primer for exploring why people do what they do in sales situations.  If you are in sales and you have ever struggled to understand the mindset of your prospect; if you have ever wondered why honest, moral, ethical people choose to lie to a salesperson; if you have ever wished for more control over sales interactions that seem to ride a fine line between trust and confusion; if you have ever struggled to understand and deal effectively with your own mindset and your own frustrations when selling—this book is for you. It provides critical insights on human behavior that will help you to understand and control your sales calls. If you are a sales manager or a coach, this book will challenge you. It will ask you to consider the possibility that the best way to help a struggling salesperson may be to help them to create a better understanding of the fears, anxieties, and confusion that often arise about the sales process—both the seller’s and the buyer’s. Understanding this is more essential than drilling your team in the right tactics. Of course, the tactics are important. They’re the answer to the question, “What do I do?” But understanding the “why” behind the tactics might just be the best place to start.

F#ck Content Marketing: Focus on Content Experience to Drive Demand, Revenue & Relationships by Randy Frisch Click here for show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/fck-content-marketing-randy-frisch F#ck Content Marketing isn't a book for content marketers. Instead, it's for everyone in the organization who needs better context and direction for how to drive demand, revenue, and relationships with content. Truly effective companies (and marketers) create content experiences, drawing the customer into an immersive infinite scroll that mirrors the consumer experience of Netflix, Spotify, and other billion-dollar brands. Randy Frisch will push you to rethink how you approach content for complex buyer journeys. The current mindset is all about volume--the more content created, the better. But the reality is that almost 70 percent of content created within an organization is never used, and there's little point investing in content marketing if you're not leveraging the assets you create. In this book, Frisch unpacks the Content Experience Framework, arming your organization to deliver personalized experiences that leverage your content to engage your audiences at scale--as well as identify and ramp up the key players in your organization who need to own this process.

Gap Selling: Getting the Customer to Yes: How Problem-Centric Selling Increases Sales by Changing Everything You Know About Relationships, Overcoming Objections, Closing and Price by Keenan Click here for show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/gap-selling-by-keenan People don't buy from people they like. No! Your buyer doesn't care about you or your product or service. It's not your job to overcome objections, it's your buyer's. Closing isn't a skill of good salespeople; it's the skill of weak salespeople. Price isn't the main reason salespeople lose the sale. Gap Selling shreds traditional and closely held sales beliefs that have been hurting salespeople for decades. For years, salespeople have embraced a myriad of sales tactics and belief systems that have unknowingly created many of the issues they have been trying to avoid such as: long sales cycles, price objections, no decision, prospects going dark, last minute feature requests, and more. Success at sales requires more than a set of tactics. Salespeople need to understand the game of sales, how sales works, and what the buyer is going through in order to make the decision to buy (change) or not to buy (not change). Gap Selling is a game-changing book designed to raise the sales IQ of selling organizations around the world. In his unapologetic and irreverent style, Keenan breaks down the tired old sales myths causing today's frustrating sales issues, to highlight a deceptively powerful new way to connect with buyers. Today's sales world is littered with glorified order takers, beholden to a frustrated buyer, unable to influence the sale and create value. Gap Selling flips the script and creates salespeople with immense influence at every stage of the buying process, capable of impacting the sales metrics that matter:  Shorter Sales Cycles Increased Revenue Elevated Deal Values Higher Win Rates Fewer No Decisions More Leads And Happier Buyers Gap Selling elevates the sales world's selling IQ and turns sales order takers into sales influencers.

The Referral Engine by John Jantsch  Click here for the show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/the-referral-engine-john-jantsch The small business guru behind Duct Tape Marketing shares his most valuable lesson: how to get your customers to do your best marketing for you. The power of glitzy advertising and elaborate marketing campaigns is on the wane; word- of-mouth referrals are what drive business today. People trust the recommendation of a friend, family member, colleague, or even stranger with similar tastes over anything thrust at them by a faceless company. Most business owners believe that whether customers refer them is entirely out of their hands. But science shows that people can't help recommending products and services to their friends-it's an instinct wired deep in the brain. And smart businesses can tap into that hardwired desire. Marketing expert John Jantsch offers practical techniques for harnessing the power of referrals to ensure a steady flow of new customers. Keep those customers happy, and they will refer your business to even more customers. Some of Jantsch's strategies include: -Talk with your customers, not at them. Thanks to social networking sites, companies of any size have the opportunity to engage with their customers on their home turf as never before-but the key is listening. -The sales team is the most important part of your marketing team. Salespeople are the company's main link to customers, who are the main source of referrals. Getting them on board with your referral strategy is critical. -Educate your customers. Referrals are only helpful if they're given to the right people. Educate your customers about whom they should be talking to. The secret to generating referrals lies in understanding the "Customer Referral Cycle" -the way customers refer others to your company who, in turn, generate even more referrals. Businesses can ensure a healthy referral cycle by moving customers and prospects along the path of Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat, and Refer. If everyone in an organization keeps this sequence in mind, Jantsch argues, your business will generate referrals like a well-oiled machine. This practical, smart, and original guide is essential reading for any company looking to grow without a fat marketing budget.

Why Customers Leave (and How to Win Them Back) by David Avrin Click here to view the show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/why-customers-leave-david-avrin Discover the 24 reasons people are leaving you for competitors and how to win them back. In Why Customers Leave, popular customer experience and marketing speaker David Avrin makes a compelling case for customer experience as a bankable differentiator in an era of vast marketplace choices. The book lays out the very visible reasons for the recent shift in customer mindset and expectation, illustrates the myriad ways that companies inadvertently drive customers and prospects to competitors, and offers a multitude of creative strategies and tactics to attract and retain new prospects. In the book, David explores and articulates the disturbing new dynamic that has arisen from easy-to-find, one-click-away, at-your-fingertips options: "We have become a world of impatient, intolerant and demanding customers, and we move on quickly if inconvenienced in any way. Don't blame the millennials! We have seen the enemy, and it is all of us.