Amazon: Icky Slippage Business Model I never signed up for Amazon Prime, Amazon’s “pay a bunch up front then get free fast shipping all the time” deal, mostly because I usually buy more than $25 worth of books at a time, so shipping is free anyway. But today, they hit me on the checkout with a free three-month trial of Prime, so I clicked yes – what the heck? My bad for thinking they were just being nice to me as a VERY GOOD CUSTOMER. The confirmation email they sent had buried in the fine print that my subscription would auto-renew after three months for the usual $80 if I didn’t proactively opt-out on their web site. That’s a business…
Category
Books
Book Shorts: Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales
Book Shorts: Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales Jeffrey Gitomer’s Little Red Book of Selling and Little Red Book of Sales Answers were great refreshers in sales basics for you as CEO (and head of sales, and sales manager, and sales rep). The books were a bit “self-help” flavor for my taste as a reader, but they were excellent on content, and I have two long pages of notes of “back to basics” items I need to remind myself and my team about. Anyone at Return Path in sales/account-project management/marketing — your copy is on the way, hopefully by way of a barter I proposed with the author (sorry, Stephanie and Tami…), but in any case, we’ll buy them. Anyone else…
Naked Talking
Naked Talking Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing The Way Businesses Talk with Consumers, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, would have been mildly interesting had I never read, let alone written, a blog. So chances are if you’re reading this blog regularly, it’s not a great use of your time or money, but if you just ran across this post while trying to learn more about blogging – or really about any form of post-2002 Internet marketing – it’s probably worthwhile as a primer. But if you’re knee-deep in internet marketing or blogging, it may be a bit of a snoozer. I find it entertaining that leading bloggers like Scoble and Israel, who are part of the ultra-small group…
Book Short: Great Marketing Checklists
Book Short: Great Marketing Checklists Trade Show and Event Marketing: Plan, Promote, and Profit, by our direct marketing colleague Ruth Stevens, is hardly a page-turner, but it is a great read and well worth the money for anyone in your B2B marketing department. That’s true as much for the event marketing specialist as the marketing generalist. The author brings a very ROI-focused approach to planning and executing events – whether big trade shows or smaller corporate events, which are becoming increasingly popular in recent years for cost, focus, and control reasons. But beyond events, the book has a number of excellent checklists that are more general for marketers that I found quite useful both as a reminder of things we…
Agile Reading
Agile Reading While not exactly a laugh a minute, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, by Mary and Tom Poppendieck, is a good read for anyone who is a practitioner of agile development — or anything agile. (Note: if you want a laugh a minute, read Who Moved My Blackberry?, which as Brad says, is hilarious — kind of like The Office in book form). As I wrote about here and here, Return Path now does both agile development and agile marketing. The book draws many interesting comparisons between manufacturing and engineering, which I found quite interesting, and not just because I’m a former management consultant — there’s something that’s just easier to visualize about how an assembly line works…
Book short: Myers-Briggs Redux
Book short: Myers-Briggs Redux Instinct: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial DNA to Achieve Your Business Goals, by Tom Harrison of Omnicom, is an ok book, although I wouldn’t rush out to buy it tomorrow. The author talks about five broad aspects of our personalities that influence how we operate in a business setting: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. These traits are remarkably similar to those in the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that so many executives have taken over the years. It’s not just that you want to be high, high, high, high, and low in the Big 5. Harrison asserts that successful entrepreneurs need a balance of openness and conscientiousness in order to be receptive to new ideas, but…
Book Short: Which Runs Faster, You or Your Company?
Book Short: Which Runs Faster, You or Your Company? Leading at the Speed of Growth, by Katherine Catlin at the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership is a must read for any entrepreneur or CEO of a growth company. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read targeted to that audience – its content is great, its format is a page-turner, and it’s concise and to the point. The authors take you through three stages of a growth company’s lifestyle (Initial Growth, Rapid Growth, and Continuous Growth) and describe the “how to’s” of the transition into each stage: how you know it’s coming, how to behave in the new stage, how to leave the old stage behind. I didn’t realize…
Book short: Proto Gladwell
Book short: Proto Gladwell I’m sure author Robert Cialdini would blanch if he read this comparison, but then again, I can’t be the first person to make it, either. His book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, is an outstanding read for any marketing or sales professional, but boy does it remind me of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink (book; blog post). Of course, Cialdini’s book came out a decade before Gladwell’s! Anyway, Influence is a great social science look at the psychology that makes sales and marketing work. Cialdini talks about sales and marketing professionals as “compliance practitioners,” which is a great way to think about them, quite frankly. He boils down the things that make sales and…
Book Short: Fables and Morals
Book Short: Fables and Morals Courtesy of my colleague Stephanie Miller, I had a quick holiday read of Aesop & The CEO: Powerful Business Lessons from Aesop and America’s Best Leaders, by David Noonan, which I enjoyed. The book was similar in some ways to Squirrel, Inc., which I recently posted about, in that it makes its points by allegory and example (and not that it’s relevant, but that it relies on animals to make its points). Noonan takes a couple dozen of Aesop’s ancient Greek fables and groups them in to categories like Rewards & Incentives, Management & Leadership, Strategy, HR, Marketing, and Negotiations & Alliances – and for each one, he gives modern-day management examples of the lessons….
Like Fingernails on a Chalkboard
Like Fingernails on a Chalkboard Anyone who worked in the Internet in the early days probably remembers all-too-vividly how silly things got near the end. Even those who had nothing to do with the industry but who were alive at the time with an extra dollar or two to invest in the stock market probably has some conception of the massive roller coaster companies were on in those years. The memories/images/perceptions all come crashing down in the latest chapter of Tom Evslin’s blook hackoff.com in a manner that reminds me of the sound of fingernails racing down a chalkboard. You’ve heard it before, you can’t forget it, you squirm every time you hear it, but you can’t tear yourself away…
Book Short: Underdog Victorious
Book Short: Underdog Victorious The Underdog Advantage, by David Morey and Scott Miller, was a worthwhile read, though not a great book. It was a little shallow, and although I enjoyed its case studies (who doesn’t love hearing about Ben & Jerry’s, Southwest, JetBlue, Starbucks?), I didn’t feel like the authors did enough to tie the details of the success of the case study companies back to the points they made in the book. That said, the book had some great reminders in it for companies of all sizes and stages. The main point was that successful companies always think of themselves as the underdog, the insurgent, and never get complacent. They run themselves like a political campaign, needing to…