I'm so excited to announce the 5th book was just published! It's titledDealstorming: The Secret Weapon That Can Solve Your Toughest Sales Challenges. It's based on my experience at Yahoo and then as a consultant, where I helped sales teams close hundreds of millions of dollars of deals and account renewals through teamwork. The main idea behind the book is that it's getting complicated to make a sale, keep a client or raise money for your business. To solve all the problems and stand out from the crowd, innovation is required at every step of the journey. And here's the key: Genius is a team sport.
Dealstorming is chocked full of stories and case studies from my days at broadcast.com and Yahoo as well as from 200+ interviews I've conducted with sales leaders and business owners. In Dealstorming, I reveal the 7 steps to creating and leading a multi-disciplinary team to victory. Even if you work at a small firm, you can still recruit collaborators and in the book, I'll show you how to punch above your weight.
If you are in sales, own a business, want to be a business owner or aspire to become a more effective leader, this book is for you. I've spent the last three years writing this book, and today is very important as we need to sell enough copies to move the needle on the best seller lists and help the rest of the world discover my work. Your support means a great deal to the success of this book launch!
BUY A COPY AND RECEIVE THESE BONUSES!
Immediate delivery of my Relationship Power eBook, an update to Love Is the Killer App with new tips on mentoring & networking.
One pass to my 120 minute Dealstorming video boot camp for each copy purchased. $299 value for each attendee!
FREE 45-minute live webinar experience for your team where I'll cover the book's content and offer advice on your specific sales challenges. Requires 50 book purchase minimum.
My 5th book isDealstorming: The Secret Weapon That Can Solve Your Toughest Sales Challenges. It offers you a strategy to complete the most complex and important deals you face through collaboration and teamwork. It shares stories from my days at Yahoo as well as consulting engagements I've been a part of. It reveals insights from over 200 interviews with sales leaders and top B2B executives. Here's what one thought leader said about it:
"Dealstorming is a high energy book about the way people collaborate in business today. Whether you are in sales, operations, management, or executive leadership, Tim Sanders will show you how combining diverse perspectives leads to extraordinary innovation and success. Pack with ideas, stories and strategies, this is a book you can't afford NOT to read." - Ken Blanchard, coauthor of Collaboration Begins With You.
The book comes out on February 23, but I need your help today to generate momentum with my retail and online partners and improve it's discoverability. When you pre-order a copy, it really makes a big difference to my campaign, especially on launch day. So I've put together a package of great bonuses, worth over $300.00.
Pre-Order AND RECEIVE THESE BONUSES!
Immediate delivery of my Relationship Power eBook, an update to Love Is the Killer App with new tips on mentoring & networking.
One pass to my 120 minute Dealstorming video boot camp for each copy purchased. $299 value for each attendee!
Immediate delivery of a signed limited edition advance reader copy of Dealstorming. Requires a 20 book purchase minimum.
FREE 45-minute live webinar experience for your team where I'll cover the book's content and offer advice on your specific sales challenges. Requires 50 book purchase minimum.
After a writing journey that took almost three years, I'm excited to announce my next book, Dealstorming: The Secret Weapon That Can Solve Your Toughest Sales Challenges. Penguin Portfolio will publish it on Feb 23, 2016. It marks my return to talking about my days at Yahoo as a sales executive and introduces research and experiences I've gained as a consultant since then. For those that read Love Is the Killer App, you'll appreciate the voice and perspective of this book.
Initially, I set out to write a book on creativity in the sales process, something very needed in business to business, where it's getting tougher to land quality deals due to competition, more decision makers and technology. During my career, I often called upon my creative experiences (musician, poet) to tackle high-difficulty sales situations. A 2012 survey I conducted found a high correlation between sales executives who had creative projects and sales executives who were top 5% performers at their company. But as I dug into research on the nature of creativity, especially as it could relate to sales innovation, I made a startling discovery: There is no big idea, no lone inventor, no genius person. Most of all the breakthroughs in history occurred because of team-based collaboration, where multiple minds from diverse disciplines built upon ideas or observations.
This made sense once I could dispel the romantic notions of the lone inventor experiencing the eureka moment. At Yahoo and as a consultant, sales genius was always a team sport. When we included everyone with a stake in the outcome or knowledge about the sales challenge, we closed the business most of the time. After interviewing 200 sales leaders across all industries it became clear to me that cross-department team work is the secret to B2B success. So this book will reveal a repeatable process for team building, team leadership and sales innovation I term "Dealstorming." Over the next few years, I'll be writing about sales innovation weekly here along with my usual coverage of leadership and success.
If you have a sales conference next year or a B2B client summit, please consider bringing me in to give your keynote. I'll motivate everyone to collaborate when stuck, lead others to explore new paths and forge relationships across their company and out into the market. I'll also do free consulting prior to the event, helping you and your team immediately put these concepts to work against big opportunities in your pipeline or major accounts at risk. Contact us for more on this.
Thanks to my good friends at SLAM Agency, there's a video trailer to explain the book's concept and reveal details on how you can get a free chapter. Please share it with your friends and connection in sales and leadership. I'm going to be scouring social media to spot your shares, and will be picking out some of you to send a special gift to.
It's that time of year when publishers release copious amounts of business books. You've probably seen them popping up in the airport book shops. As a voracious reader and blurb-giving-author, I have the opportunity to review dozens of them between July and September. My interests range from sales & marketing to leadership to futurism to success. I look for a book that challenges conventional wisdom, offers a rich perspective grounded in fact and most of all, advice that I can put into practice.
This fall, there are three books in particular that I'm excited about and highly recommend:
The Challenger Customer by Brent Adamson, Matt Dixon, Pat Spenner & Nick Toman: This is the follow up to the fantastic Challenger Sale. In this book, the CEB team reveals how difficult it is for companies to buy services or change suppliers. This is due to a rising number of decision makers involved in every major purchase, and the disfunction that comes from diversity of agendas. Their solution is for marketing to create challenger content that acts as "a dog whistle" which attracts mobilizers inside prospect companies. These mobilizers often display signs of skepticism or demand action as go-getters. But they are the key in driving consensus and ultimately change. This is a must-read for any B2B marketing or sales professional. But note: The authors will challenge your current attempts to establish your company as a thought leader with barrages of content. In their eyes, "looking smart" isn't nearly as effective as "proving you are wrong" when it comes to content marketing that finds the mobilizer.
Vaporized by Robert Tercek: This book will take you on a journey of technological disruption, which few companies have mastered. Tercek is a certified futurist, with a career arc that spans from founding MTV International to consulting with the most elite tech and digital media companies in the world. He chronicles the vaporization of print, television and all types of media ... and why companies either found success or failure in the transition. Then he explains that "anything that can be infrastructure will be," using companies like AirBnb to illustrate the unfair advantage that comes from being digital. He reveals insights into the App Economy, Peer-To-Peer media and Big Data. But unlike most futurists, he won't leave you hanging. The end of the book offers a solid blueprint for navigating the vaporization of all things service, and how you can convert disruption into a game changing opportunity.
Grit To Great by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval: This book is all about the power of pluck and determination when it comes to leading others, being an entrepreneur or succeeding in the face of adversity. The authors reveal the attribute that Michael Jordan, Alibaba's Jack Ma and Michael Bloomberg share: Grit. In a world of look-at-me or stand-out-in-a-sea-of-sameness, Thaler and Koval offer a different viewpoint: Grit is about sweat not swagger. You are nothing special. Grit is cultivated over time and is the result of practice and design. The book lays out a series of steps, mostly decisions you need to make, that lead to a higher level of grit, which is easily converted in greatness (confidence, effectiveness, innovativeness). From the Lead To Learn conference, Thaler offers a glimpse into the book's content in this video clip.
Recently, I was booked to give the closing keynote at an annual corporate meeting for an industry leader. Their CEO had a vision for the meeting: Create A Mindset Where Winning Is the Only Acceptable Outcome. She picked me because I'd worked at a company (Yahoo) that famously developed this outlook, then lost it over time.
Lafley believes that strategy is "an integrated set of choices about how to win in the marketplace." In other words, strategy is not about accomplishing a certain task or reaching a certain goal. Those are tactics. Being strategic is about making the hard choices to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in the eyes of customers.
He's got an attitude about leaders that see it any other way. He picks on companies like Saturn, a GM division, that was 'Playing for the sake of playing.' They never intended on beating the Japanese at their game. They just wanted to sell cars in 'the low end of the market,' so Saturn was created. They were not resourced to outperform Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Kia or Hyundai, and eventually, the division was shuttered.
He's even harder on leaders that Play To Survive. In his view, "a company must seek to win in a particular place and in a particular way. If it doesn't seek to win, it is wasting the time of its and the investments of its capital providers." He's right too. Around 2003, I witnessed the Yahoo culture shift from winning to "hanging in there". This was the beginning of the sideways years for the company. We watched competitors like Google leapfrog us with moonshots (Google Earth), while we played it safe by incrementally improving products (Click To Print Map).
Over and over again, Lafley stresses the choices leaders must make in their strategy. The first choice is 'What is our winning aspiration?' which leads to a cascade of choices which build on each other.
I like this cascade (based on the work of Michael Porter, one of Lafley's mentors). It starts with our aspiration or purpose, which according to Jim Collins, should be audacious. Lafley points out that "too many companies eventually die a death of modest aspirations." They made modest choices that the beginning of the strategy cascade, which then led to market-mediocrity.
Then, the second strategic choice is location - where are we going to win? This narrows the market, sometimes to a specific niche where a true winning opportunity lies. Narrowing the market is a hard choice for many, making it even more strategic. But to narrow the market is to narrow the scope of competition as well - making it easier to win.
The next difficult choice has to do with our weapons in the market, the sources of our competitive advantage. In Lafley's view, they need to relate to the perceived value the company delivers to its most important customers. Then, the next choice is about which resources need to be marshaled to deliver that competitive advantage over time. Finally, choices about management systems are made to ensure a high degree of operating excellence. This is a great exercise for any business leader or entrepreneur thinking through their strategy. Each choice is limiting, and serves to give the company a true sense of focus.
One of his stinging points is that "Too many leaders define strategy as the optimization of the status quo." In his view, this leads to sameness, which is not a strategy but "a recipe for mediocrity."
To Lafley's cascade, I added a six element: How Do We Close Value Gaps? This is based on the work of Sandra Vandermerwe in her book Customer Capitalism. Stanley Marcus Jr. told me about this book back in 1999 when he was sharing a case study about the Mercedes Smart Car launch in Europe.
The idea is that you can't lock in a customer anymore with contracts or proprietary technology. Your efforts to do so have decreasing returns over time. The key to winning over time is to get the customer to lock on to your company that solving all their problems in the activity space. For Mercedes' Smart car launch, the activity space they focused on was short haul mobility. The car was designed for trips up to about 100 kilometers at most. For such a specific activity focus, there are obviously value gaps that they need to close: Repair, Renting a bigger car, Insurance, Maintenance and so on.
Here's the idea: Each value gap is an opportunity for a competitor to enter your customer's life and steal them. If you've rented a car at Avis, for example, you likely drove a GM product such as a Malibu or an Impala. If you drive another brand, that's an example of a value gap they didn't close, which might lead you to switch later. Mercedes anticipated this in their strategy, so they provided rental car services to close that gap.
For my keynote, I used a more contemporary example from the medical care industry. For Baxter Healthcare's Renal Bag product line, they built a strategy around the activity space of maintaining kidney health. As they built a wining strategy, they realized that the customer has pre-during-post needs. Up until then, they only played in the 'during' phase, where their bags were part of treatment.
From pre-treatment advice to post-treatment therapy, Baxter had value gaps a competitor could drive a truck through - dropping off samples of a competitive core product. So the team built or partnered their way into an airtight approach to the market, which served the activity space with their product serving as a piece of the puzzle and not a commodity.
My audience was intrigued and provoked into action at the same time. Several focused on choice #2 (where do we win?) and #6 (how do we close value gaps?) as key questions to answer quickly in order to protect their winning hand.
My closing words echoed Lafley's perspective: If you are not playing to win, at best case, you are losing a little more each day. It's a matter of tough choices about the things that matter ... to the customer.
Less than a year ago, I met Nolan Bushnell at a METal breakfast, where I gave a talk on "the Future of Publishing." He told me he had a few books he was working on, and was interested in talking to me about publishing them via Net Minds.
We met the following week (see above) and cooked up a third idea: Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Retain and Nurture Creative Talent. I had just read Steve Jobs (by Walter Isaacson), and was aware of Nolan's history with Jobs, and how he created a creative-friendly workplace culture at Atari. I knew that many companies today need a creative genius to reinvent their products, or perhaps their industry.
Nolan talked to me about all the changes he made, and how so many of today's companies are getting it wrong. They filter out the creatives, then let the naysayers discourage the few that get in. We both realized that this was the book he needed to write, so he joined Net Minds and we started the project.
Using the Net Minds network, we put together a team around Nolan's book that included editorial, design, marketing and media relations team members. On March 26, it was the first publication by our young company, and it was covered widely: AP, NYT, AllThingsD, Mashable, Fox and Friends and In the Loop on Bloomberg TV.
We got this book to market in less than 1/2 the time it would have taken through traditional means. We've already cut deals to license the book in Russia and Taiwan, with several foreign publishers on deck. Many of you have supported us by buying a copy of the book. It's a great read, and will help managers and leaders of all types attract, hire and retain creative talent.
The book is comprised of short chapters (Pongs, read on here) that give YRMV advice on how to change your culture, environment and process to be more creative-friendly. Here's what Walter Isaacson said about the book when he read it (on an iPad): "An absolutely invaluable book by the founder of Atari and the man who launched Steve Jobs' career."
We have a special offer for companies or organizations. If you'll buy a minimum of 100 copies, we can setup a Skype or webinar with Nolan as a priceless bonus (based on mutual availability). If you are interested, email me!
For those that are eBook friendly (maybe everyone has an iPad?), we have a special way of helping you buy them in bulk for your whole company. Here's what our partner BookShout did for one of Nolan's speaking clients.
Sweet, huh? Again, if you are interested in this, drop me a note.
To me, books are like people in your life: You development a relationship with them that defines how you feel about them. And I'm in love with The Impact Equation by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.
Why? Style + Substance. Hard to find in any professional book, but comes in spades in the highly readable think piece. These cats have words that sing like my favorite reads such as The Purple Cow or ReWork. (Sorry, no more links in my blog posts, they are shiny objects that will distract you. I'll have references links at the end...so keep reading.)
The book will help you understand how vital strategic content is to the modern marketer. If you don't deeply connect with people, you'll ship words that no one cares about (or reads). If you make a difference via your content, it will spread like all treasures do online. This sounds straightforward, but Brogan and Smith's intricate advice proves how treacherous it can be - and why you need to read this book right away.
While many "social media" books focus on the platforms, tools and (spammy) tactics it takes to build a 'following,' this book centers on what really matters...content that works. What I took away from the book, was that we need to become purposeful and masterful at connecting with people, especially with the media we create and the words we share. Figure this out, and you'll rock the next wave of social, regardless of what form it may come in.
We live in a world where 8 out of 10 people "have a book in them."
But along the way, I'm come to a bigger discovery: Most of us have what it takes to contribute to a book project and find real meaning along the way. Some of us have great editorial and writing skills, likely honed from college and work experiences. Some of us are great designers, be it Photoshop gurus or branding experts. And then many of you have marketing and publicity chops, that could help a book become more discoverable upon launch.
Of all things you could be working on, books are likely the most valuable. Books are the rare media products people are willing to pay for. Their long form nature lends itself to having a bigger impact on the reader than a blog, newsletter or magazine article. Finally, the nature of book projects enable you to make new friends and professional connections far beyond what you are achieving with networking services like LinkedIn.
So what are you waiting for? At Net Minds, we've created a platform that connects authors and freelance talent (just like you). In some cases, the relationship is work-for-hire. But in most cases, you are real partner, cut into the profits of the book over the long haul.
On several of our projects, editors/designers/marketers are working on their first book project - leveraging their other experiences and producing fresh work that will thrill readers. We've also secured some of the top editorial, design and marketing talents to contribute to our projects. They understand how disruptive our Group Publishing model is, and that's why they are getting involved at the ground floor.
In the digital future, it will be easy to make corrections to a book, to keep it from getting out of date or in my case -- out of practice. While the thesis of the book (promote others' success) is more true than ever, there are some corrections I'd like to make:
1. eBooks are how I gather deep knowledge. In LITKA, I argued that we should buy only hard cover books and utilize the blank pages at the beginning and the end of the book for note taking (cliffing/tagging). This was in comparison to soft cover books and pre-Kindle/iPad times. When I wrote the book, eBook readers were clunky and inventory was incomplete. These days, I read almost everything on my Kindle. I've also figured out a way to highlight and take notes in such a way so I can easily re-study a book in just a few minutes. My new reading habit has enabled me to read many more books, and when traveling, to bounce around between multiple titles instead of just choosing one (light) book.
2. Protect Your Network While You Network. More than ever, our network is our net worth, it's our platform to move forward and do good. We should protect it by making sure our networking efforts are productive. Networking people, just because they ask you to, isn't an act of BizLove. It's an act of compromising your existing relationships out of a sense of duty or guilt.
For exmaple: I get requests by entrepreneurs to 'hook them up' with my old boss Mark Cuban (Shark Tank). In a few situations, I truly believe that the introduction would be good for Mark as well as the entrepreneur, and in those situations, I make the (email) introduciton. The key here is to make sure there's a win/win for both the asker and your network node, otherwise it's just more noise (and still, no real value add). One other way to network appropriately is to collect a little information for the prospector and shop it to the target to see if an introduction is desired.
3. Hugging Is Risky At Work. When I wrote LITKA, it was still OK to be warm at work with others, and give them a hug as a greeting. Over time, the litigation environment is as of such, that I suggest we practice discretion prior to any phsycial contact with others, beyond a hearty handshake. This is especially true between members of the opposite sex.
Last, but not least, I'd like to make a disclaimer: Being a Lovecat doesn't mean you say yes to all requests of you. It doesn't mean that nothing can upset you. It doesn't mean that anything you have is available to anyone else. I'm growing weary of people who tell me, "Hey, you aren't being very Lovecat!" when I say, "no" to them or criticize an idea or an action. In my book, I defined a Lovecat as someone who "intelligently share his or her intangibles to promote growth in others." I never claimed that they were pushovers.
Here's an update on the progress of Net Minds, a publishing startup I've co-founded.
A few weeks ago, we announced the addition of Chris Brogan to our team. Not only will he advise us on publishing tools and social media, he's contributing his music too!
For editors (of all types), book designers, publicists and marketing pro's, here's an animation that explains how Net Minds works for free lance talent. Please share and if it appeals to you, sign up to receive the Net Minds Select, a collection of awesome book projects looking for partners.
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