Book Short:  Two New Ones from Veteran Writers

I’m feeling very New York this week.  I just read both Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, and Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America, by Tom Friedman.  Both are great, and if you like the respective authors’ prior works, are must reads.

In Outliers, Gladwell’s simple premise is that talents are both carefully cultivated and subject to accidents of fate as much as they are genetic.  I guess that’s not such a brilliant premise when you look at it like that.  But as with his other two books, The Tipping Point (about how trends and social movements start and spread) and Blink (about how the mind makes judgments), his examples are fascinating, well researched, and very well written.  Here are a couple quick nuggets, noting that I don’t have the book in front of me, so my numbers might be slightly off:

• Of the 200 wealthiest people in human history, 9 were Americans born within 5 years of each other in the 1830s – far from a normal distribution for wealth holders/creators
• Most Silicon Valley titans were both within 2 years of each other in 1954-1955
• 40% of great hockey players are born in Q1; 30% in Q2; 20% in Q3; and 10% in Q4, as the “cutoff date” for most youth leagues is January 1, so the biggest/oldest kids end up performing the best, getting the best coaches and most attention that propels them throughout their careers

Also, as with his other books, it’s hard to necessarily draw great and sweeping conclusions or create lots of social policy, both of which are quite tempting, as a result of the data.  Scholarly, comprehensive research it might not be, but boy does he make you think twice about, well, lots of things.

In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Tom Friedman makes a convincing case that two wrongs can make a right, or more to the point, that fixing two wrongs at the same time is a good way of fixing each one more than otherwise would be possible.  What I like best about this book is that it’s not just another liberal journalist trashing America — Friedman’s whole premise here (not to mention language) is fiercely optimistic and patriotic, that if we as a country take a sweeping global leadership role in containing CO2 emissions, we will both save the planet and revive our economy, sustaining our global economic leadership position into the next century at a time when others are decrying the end of the American empire.

His examples are real and vivid.  Like Gladwell, one never knows how unbiased or comprehensive Friedman is, but he covers some of these topics very poignantly:

• The very strong negative correlation between control of oil supply and democracy/freedom
• A comprehensive vision for the energy world of the future that’s very cool, apparently has already been piloted somewhere, and feels like it’s actually doable
• The startling numbers, even if you sort of know them already, about the sheer number of people who will be sharing our planet and consuming more and more resources in the coming decades
• How too many years of being a privileged nation has led to politics he brilliantly calls “dumb as we wanna be”

Friedman calls his mood sober optimism — that’s a good description.  It’s a very timely book as many Americans hold out hope for the new administration’s ability to lead the country in a positive direction and also restore American’s damaged image in the world come January 20. I have to confess that I still haven’t read Friedman’s The Earth Is Flat, although I read him in the New York Times enough and have seen enough excerpts (and lived in business enough the last 5 years!) to get the point.  And actually, Hot, Flat, and Crowded has enough of the “Flat” part in it that even if you haven’t read The Earth is Flat, you’ll get more than just the gist of it.

Book Short – Blink part III – Undo?

I just finished reading Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, and honestly, I wish I could hit Life’s Undo button and reclaim those hours.  I love Michael Lewis, and he’s one of those authors where if he writes it, I will read it.  But this one wasn’t really worth it for me.

Having said that, I think if you haven’t already read both Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (review, buy) and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (review, buy), then it might be worth it.  But having read those two books, The Undoing Project had too much overlap and not enough “underlap” (to quote my friend Tom Bartel) – that is, not enough new stuff of substance for me.  The book mostly went into the personal relationship between two academic thinkers, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.  It also touched on some of the highlights of their work, which, while coming out of the field of psychology, won them a Nobel prize in Economics for illuminating some of the underlying mechanics of how we make decisions.

The two most interesting pieces of their work to me, which are related in the book, are:

First, that human decision-making is incredibly nuanced and complex, and that at least 25% of the time, the transitive property doesn’t apply.  For example, I may prefer coffee to tea, and I may prefer tea to hot chocolate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I prefer coffee to hot chocolate.

From the book, “When faced with complex multidimensional alternatives, such as job offers, gambles or [political] candidates, it is extremely difficult to utilize properly all the available information.” It wasn’t that people actually preferred A to B and B to C and then turned around and preferred C to A. It was that it was sometimes very hard to understand the differences. Amos didn’t think that the real world was as likely to fool people into contradicting themselves as were the experiments he had designed.  And the choice created its own context: Different features might assume greater prominence in the mind when the coffee was being compared to tea (caffeine) than when it was being compared to hot chocolate (sugar). And what was true of drinks might also be true of people, and ideas, and emotions. The idea was interesting: When people make decisions, they are also making judgments about similarity, between some object in the real world and what they ideally want. They make these judgments by, in effect, counting up the features they notice. And as the noticeability of features can be manipulated by the way they are highlighted, the sense of how similar two things are might also be manipulated.”

Second, what Kahneman and Tversky called Prospect Theory, which is basically that humans are more motivated by the fear of loss as opposed to the greed of gain.  I’ve written about the “Fear/Greed Continuum” of my former boss from many years ago before.  I’m not sure he knew about Kahneman and Tversky’s work when he came up with that construct, and I certainly didn’t know about it when I first blogged about it years ago.  Do this experiment – ask someone both of these questions:  Would you rather be handed $500 or have a 50% chance of winning $1,000 and a 50% of getting nothing?  Then, Would you rather hand me $500 or have a 50% chance of owing me $1,000 and a 50% chance of owing me nothing?  Most of the time, the answers are not the same.

For fun, I tried this out on my kids and re-proved Prospect Theory, just in case anyone was worried about it.

Anyway, bottom line on this book – read it if you haven’t ready those other two books, skip it if you have, maybe skim it if you’ve read one of them!

Drawing the Line:  Where We Come out

In the first post in this series, I laid out a dilemma we’ve had internally at Return Path in recent months: whether and how we accept clients who are in “grey” businesses like alcohol, pornography, and neutriceuticals, and whether that applies uniformly across all of our products (software vs. consulting vs. whitelist). In the second post, I reposted a summary of all the comments we received from readers. Now comes the fun part — the so what.

We had a good series of conversations internally on this issue that included some very spirited debate. Here’s where we come out.

First, we drew a distinction between three types of potentially “troublesome” clients: those whose businesses are illegal, or who advertise or sell illegal products; those whose businesses are involved in litigation around email, data, privacy, or security; and those whose businesses are in the grey area, or what we called in our discussions “morally hazardous.” In the end, we decided that for us, there’s no difference by type of product in terms of how we handle the situation. But each class of client has its own issues as well as enforcement mechanisms.

Let’s start with the easy one. Clients who break the law or whose businesses encourage others to do so have no place in our company. The challenge here is more on the edge cases — what about companies whose products or advertising are sometimes illegal (by geography or by age of target audience)? I will come back to that topic.

Next, we move on to those companies who are involved in email-related litigation. We added this category to our thinking because we view ourselves as advocates for end users, the champions of good, high quality email. Ultimately, the decision about whether or not to take on a client who is involved in email-related litigation is subjective. One example of a client we would take on is a very reputable company that has a single instance of a CAN-SPAM violation or investigation by the FTC. But there are other companies who are in much deeper. I will somewhat impolitely refer to them as “pissing in the pool.” As advocates for good email and as stewards of the email ecosystem, we can’t in good conscience allow some of these people to be clients, even of our software, if they have the potential to use the software for evil and not for good. Of course, once the litigation is finished we can re-assess, assuming the company was found to not have violated any laws.

Finally, the tough category, the “morally hazardous.” There certainly is something that resonates with us around one user’s comment that, to paraphrase, if you’re not comfortable telling everyone around the dinner table that you work for Client X, you shouldn’t work for Client X (or, Client XXX, as it were). But at the end of the day, legislating morality is impossible to get right for everyone, at every time. We think it’s not our business what kind of legal business our clients are in. In fact, we go so far as to say that as advocates for end users, our criteria around which clients to accept should be as objective as possible — that is to say, much more around their email reputation (how much do users like the content) than about some arbitrary judgment about what’s right and what’s wrong. We feel like as long as we maintain our policy of allowing employees to opt-out from working with clients or seeing clients’ content that makes them uncomfortable, we’re in as good shape here as we’re going to be.

Of course, that’s not to say we won’t, on a case-by-case basis, turn down a client because of their business. We aren’t a public utility. We have the right to walk away from a client for any reason (or, not to put too fine a point on it, no reason at all). But as a matter of policy we’ve decided to focus on email practices as a basis for who we work with and leave questions of morality of certain types of business aside.

As a final note, we clarified our policies for vetting and enforcing these standards. These do differ a bit by product. For our by-application whitelist, Sender Score Certified, we will continue to ask questions around the types of products and content that prospective clients include or link to in their emails. We will perform extra pre-client research on clients that check a number of boxes on the application that indicate they might be in a grey area or are involved in litigation. We will ask clients to self-certify their goodness. We will perform spot audits of these clients to make sure they stay in compliance with the things that are impossible to automatically monitor, even those tricky ones which are “sometimes legal.” And we will not be shy about terminating those who aren’t.

For our software and professional services, we have a “client vetting” document that asks some of those same questions, and against which we will research and audit as appropriate. For clients of our professional services, we require that sales/client services fill out this document 100% of the time for our standards and compliance team to review. For software clients, we leave it up to sales/client services management to flag the cases where there might be an issue and to run only those clients through the same vetting process.

I think that about wraps this topic up, at least for now. We do our best on this stuff, but it’s tricky, and I have no doubt that however we handle these situations, we will upset someone. I appreciate everyone’s input on this, and I welcome more by commenting below.

Book Short:  A Brand Extension That Works

Usually, brand or line extensions don’t work out well in the end.  They dilute and confuse the brand.  Companies with them tend to see their total market share shrink, while focused competitors flourish.  As the authors of the seminal work from years ago, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Jack Trout and Al Reis would be the first people to tell you this.

That said, The New Positioning, which I guess you could call a line extension by Jack Trout (without Reis), was a fantastic read.  Not quite as good as the original, but well worth it.  It’s actually not a new new book – I think it’s 12 years old as opposed to the original, which is now something like 25 years old, but I just read it and think it’s incredibly relevant to today’s world.

Building on the original work, Trout focuses more this time on Repositioning and Brand Extensions — two things critical to most businesses today.  How to do the impossible, to change people’s minds about your brand or product mid-stream, whether in response to new competitive activity or general changes in the world around you.  And how to think about brand extensions (hint:  don’t do them, create a new brand like Levi’s did with Dockers).

The book also has a very valuable section on the importance of sound and words to branding and positioning, relative to imagery.  Trout has a short but very colorful metaphor about women named Gertrude here that’s reminiscent of the research Malcolm Gladwell cited in Blink.

If you haven’t read the original Positioning, that should be on your wish list for the holidays.  If you have, then maybe Santa can deliver The New Positioning!

Book Short:  The Religion of Heresy

At the end of Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, Seth Godin’s new book, Seth says this:

I’m going to get a lot of flak from people about what you just read. People might say that it’s too disorganized or not practical enough or that I require you to do too much work to actually accomplsh anything. That’s ok.

He’s kind of right. The book is a little breezy and meanders around, just like riffing with Seth. It’s not practical in the sense that if the entire world operated this way in the extreme, we’d have serious problems. But the fact that he requires you to do “too much work to actually accomplish anything” is part of the brilliance of his message.

This was Seth’s best book in years, mostly because it is fresh. It is not a rant about marketing; it is a wonderfully succinct look at how we as a society are rallying and organizing around causes, campaigns, companies, and collective beliefs. It’s not about the Internet, though its principles are easily implemented and amplified using online tools. It’s not a how-to guide to being a fancy corporate leader, but it’s one of the most pointed descriptions of the ethos of a certain type of leader (the upstart, or as Seth says, the heretic). It’s not about a particular revolution; it’s about how mini-revolutions are becoming the norm these days.

Tribes is short, inspirational, and pure Seth. Though quite different in its nature and mission, it really evoked for me Mark Penn’s Microtrends (post, link) — a study of larger tribes and heretics in contemporary America.

A listing of Seth’s books over the years follows:

• Permission Marketing — the original

• Unleashing the Ideavirus — good follow up on viral marketing

• Really Bad Powerpoint (ebook) — the standard for not being boring when you present

• The Big Red Fez — the standard on designing great web sites

• Survival Is Not Enough — motivating about being a nimble company

• Free Prize Inside — on being buzzworthy

• Purple Cow — on being remarkable, a great book

• The Big Moo — good follow-up with remarkable examples

• Small Is the New Big — not worth it if you read his blog

• All Marketers Are Liars — fine, a little “more of the same”

• The Dip — haven’t read it

• Meatball Sundae — haven’t read it

• Tribes — see above

Book Short:  Culture is King

Joy, Inc.:  How We Built a Workplace People Love, by Richard Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations, was a really good read. Like Remote  which I reviewed a few weeks ago, Joy, Inc. is ostensibly a book about one thing — culture — but is also full of good general advice for CEOs and senior managers.

Also like Remote, the book was written by the founder and CEO of a relatively small firm that is predominately software engineers, so there are some limitations to its specific lessons unless you adapt them to your own environment. Unlike Remote, though, it’s neither preachy nor ranty, so it’s a more pleasant read.  And I suppose fitting of its title, a more joyful read as well. (Interestingly on this comparison, Sheridan has a simple and elegant argument against working remotely in the middle of the book around innovation and collaboration.)

Some of the people-related practices at Sheridan’s company are fascinating and great to read about. In particular, the way the company interviews candidates for development roles is really interesting — more of an audition than an interview, with candidates actually writing code with a development partner, the way the company writes code. Different teams at Return Path interview in different ways, including me for both the exec team and the Board, but one thing I know is that when an interview includes something that is audition-like, the result is much stronger. There are half a dozen more rich examples in the book.

Some of the other quotable lines or concepts in the book include:

• the linkage between scalability with human sustainability (you can’t grow by brute force, you can only grow when people are rested and ready to bring their brain to work)
• “Showcasing your work is accountability in action” (for a million reasons, starting with pride and ending with pride)
• “Trust, accountability, and results — these get you to joy” (whether or not you are a Myers-Briggs J, people do get a bit of a rush out of a job well done)
• “…the fun and frivolity of our whimsically irreverent workplace…” (who doesn’t want to work for THAT company?)
• “When even your vendors want to align with your culture, you know you’re on the right path” (how you treat people is how you treat PEOPLE, not just clients, not just colleagues)
• “One of the key elements of a joyful culture is having team members who trust one another enough to argue” (if you and I agree on everything, one of us is not needed)
• “The reward is in the attempt” (do you encourage people to fail fast often enough?)
• “Good problems are good problems for the first five minutes. Then they just feel like regular problems until you solve them” (Amen, Brother Sheridan)

The benefits of a joyful culture (at Return Path, we call it a People-First culture) have long been clear to me. As Sheridan says, we try to “create a culture where people want to come to work every day.” Cultures like ours look soft and squishy from the outside, or to people who have grown up in tough, more traditional corporate environments. And to be fair, the challenge with a culture like ours is keeping the right balance of freedom and flexibility on one side and high performance and accountability on the other. But the reality is that most companies struggle with most of the same issues — the new hire that isn’t working out or the long-time employee who isn’t cutting it any more, the critical path project that doesn’t get done on time, the missed quarter or lost client.  As Sheridan notes though, one key benefit of working at a joyful company is that problems get surfaced earlier when they are smaller…and they get solved collaboratively, which produces better results. Another key benefit, of course, is that if you’re going to have the same problems as everyone else, you might as well have fun while you’re dealing with them.

If you don’t love where you work and wish you did, read Joy, Inc. If you love where you work but see your company’s faults and want to improve them, read Joy, Inc. If you are not in either of the above camps, go find another job!

Book Short:  Is CX the new UX?

Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine from Forrester Research, was a good read that kept crossing back and forth between good on the subject at hand, and good business advice in general.  The Customer Experience (CX) movement is gaining more and more steam these days, especially in B2B companies like Return Path.  The authors define Customer Experience as “how your customers perceive their interactions with your company,” and who doesn’t care about that?

A few years ago, people started talking a lot more about User Experience (UX) as a new crossover discipline between design and engineering, and our experience at Return Path has been that UX is an incredibly powerful tool in our arsenal to build great technical products via lean/agile methods.  The recurring thought I had reading this book, especially for companies like ours, was “Is CX the new UX?”

In other words, should we just be taking the same kind of lean/agile approach to CX that we do with technical product development and UX — but basically do it more holistically across every customer touchpoint, from marketing to invoice?  It’s hard to see the answer being “no” to that question, although as with all things, the devil is in the implementation details.  And that’s true at the high level (the authors talk about making sure you align CX strategy with corporate strategy and brand attributes and values) as well as a more granular level (what metrics get tracked for CX, and how do those align with the rest of the companies KPIs).

The book’s framework for CX is six high-level disciplines: strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement, governance, and culture — but you really have to read the book to get at the specifics.

Some other thoughts and quotes from the book:

• the book contains some good advice on how to handle management of cross-functional project teams in general (which is always difficult), including a good discussion of various governance models
• “to achieve the full potential of customer experience as a business strategy, you have to change the way you run your business. You must manage from the perspective of your customers, and you must do it in a systematic, repeatable, and disciplined way.”
• one suggestion the book had for weaving the customer experience into your culture (if it’s not there already) is to invite customers to speak all-hands meetings
• another suggestion the book had for weaving the customer experience into everyone’s objectives was one company’s tactic of linking compensation (in this case, 401k match) to customer experience metrics
• “Customer Experience is a journey, not a project. It has a beginning but it doesn’t have an end.”

Thanks to my colleague Jeremy Goldsmith for recommending this book.

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 marketing work to six core factors: consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity.

Reciprocation – we hate being in a state of being beholden so much that we might even be willing to do a larger favor than the one done for us in order to remove the state.  Think about “free gifts” in merchandising as an example of this, or being in a negotiation where someone trying to make a cold sale on you offers a fallback, smaller sale.  For example, you don’t want to buy anything from the boy scout, but after you say no to the $5 raffle ticket and he asks about the $1 candy bar, you feel more obligated to buy the $1 candy bar because the boy scout has “given” on his initial request.

Consistency – once we have made a choice, personal and interpersonal pressures force us to back it up and justify our earlier decision – even more so when in writing or when declared to others.  This is why marketers love getting testimonials from customers; the testimonial locks the customer in emotionally, as well as encouraging others to buy the product.

Social proof – if others think it’s correct, it must be correct, especially if those other people are like us.  There are some scary examples in the book here, such as Reverand Jim Jones and The People’s Temple mass suicides.  Gripping, but creepy.

Liking – we listen to people we like, and we like people to whom we’re similar or who are physically attractive.  This section was especially reminiscent of Blink, but with different and more marketer-focused examples.

Authority – we have an extreme willingness to listen to authority, even when the authority isn’t quite relevant.  This is why celebrity endorsements work so well.

Scarcity – we have a extreme motivation of fear of loss, either or something, or of the opportunity to have something.  Who doesn’t like to keep doors open as long as possible?

The one place the book falls down a little bit is in the sections at the end of each chapter talking about how to resist that particular technique through jujitsu – the art of “turning the enemy’s strength to your advantage.”  While nice in theory, Cialdini’s examples aren’t super helpful beyond saying “when you think you’re getting suckered, stop — and then say no.”

Overally, though, the book is well written and choc full of examples.  Thanks to marketer Mallory Kates for sending me this great book!

Book Short:  A Must Read

Every once in a while, I read a book and think, “This is an important book.”  Microtrends, by Mark Penn, was just that kind of read.  Penn is the CEO of one of our largest clients in the market research business as well as CEO of Burson Marstellar and, more notably, the Clintons’ pollster and strategy director for much of the last 16 years.  He’s a smart guy, and more important than that, he’s awash in primary research data.

The premise of Microtrends is that America is no longer a melting pot, where lots of different people come together to try to be the same, but rather that it’s a big tent, where lots of small groups are now large enough to express their individuality powerfully.  The book is also perfect for the ADD-afflicted among us, with 75 chapters each of about 4 pages in length describing one new “microtrend” or small faction of American identity.  Penn not only describes the trend in a data-rich way but then goes on to postulate about the impact that trend will have on society at large and/or on the business opportunities that could come from serving those in the trend.

Just to give you a sample of the trends he covers:  Sex-ratio singles (explaining why there really are more single women than men), Extreme commuters (we certainly have a couple of those at Return Path),
Pro-Semites vs. Christian Zionists (they sound the same but are completely different), Newly-released Ex-cons (hint – there are a ton of them), and the rise of Chinese artists.

Whether you’re interested in marketing, entrepreneurship (you’ll get loads of ideas here), investing (more loads of ideas), or just trends in American and global society, Microtrends is a must must must read.  All 75 chapters were interesting to me, but even if you don’t love some…they’re only 4 pages each!

In 2005, I wrote a post called Unfolding the Map in which I looked at these two seemingly opposing philosophies from successful entrepreneurs:

• If you don’t have a map, you can’t get lost
• If you don’t have a map, you can’t get where you’re going

and tried to combine them when thinking about product roadmapping. The same contradiction and combination could be applied to anything, including coaching and development.

That’s why I was excited to read my friend Matt Spielman’s new book, Inflection Points: How to Work and Live with Purpose. Matt worked at Return Path twice over the years — first as employee #3 (more on that in a minute) and then over a decade later as CMO. We live near each other and know each other’s families. I’ve been lucky enough to see his career unfold and develop into what it is today, a flourishing coaching business called Inflection Point Partners that helps clients tremendously…and that also feeds Matt’s soul.

When I first met Matt and he joined me and Jack to launch Return Path in 1999, he was fresh out of business school and focused on sales and marketing from his prior career in investment banking. Our idea was that he would do the same for us as we got our product in market. But as I started focusing more on what kind of company we wanted to build and how to get there, Matt became my leading thought partner on those topics. When we got to about 25 people, he and I created a new role for him — head of Human Capital and Organization Development. While a bit clunky, that title meant that Matt was the principal person helping me create at small scale what we later branded our People First philosophy. That philosophy and the practices we developed out of it led to 20 years of a strong track record of investing in people and helping over 1,300 colleagues grow their careers by being simple, actionable, and broad-based in the way we handled feedback and development planning. This started back in 2000.

Matt’s book puts the ethos that I saw percolating over 20 years ago into a tight framework around his coaching methodology of the GPS (Game Plan System). The book is short and sweet and walks through both the philosophy and the framework in accessible terms. And while it’s true that you have to be open to new ideas, open to serendipity, and go with flow sometimes…it’s also true that if you have specific goals in mind, you are unlikely to achieve them without a focused effort.

I’ve written a lot about coaching lately between The Impact of a Good Coach and another recent post about a strong coaching framework about intentionality in Russell Benaroya’s book. In that second post, I noted that “While I have become less and less of a life planner as I’ve gotten older under the headline of ‘man plans, God laughs,’ I am a huge believer in being intentional about everything. And that pretty much sums up Matt’s book: If you don’t have a map, you can’t get where you’re going.

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 should be doing at Return Path as well as ways we should be thinking about the different elements of our B2B marketing mix.

Some of the best tables and charts include:  strengths, weaknesses, and best applications of trade shows vs. corporate events; comparative analysis of marketing tools by channel (this was great – talks about best applications for all major tools from events to newsletters to search to inside sales); 12-month exhibitor timeline for trade shows; a great riff on bad booth signage vs. good booth signage (hint:  don’t make the visitor do the work – be obvious!); business event strategic planning grid; pre-show campaign and post-show follow-up checklists; dos, don’ts and options for corporate events; a great section on qualifying and handling leads that extends well beyond trade shows; and several good case studies that are show-focused.

Thanks to Ruth herself for an autographed copy!  Team Marketing and sales leaders at Return Path – your copies are on the way.