Candid, compassionate, and brimming with pertinent, practical sales advice.
This debut guide encourages business-to-business tech salespeople to practice human-to-human selling.
Sales performance consultant Nielsen sees her clients struggle on a daily basis with the commoditization of IT products and services. Acknowledging the rise of robots, artificial intelligence, and sophisticated online purchasing, she issues a warning of sorts in this book: “Long-term success in a B2B tech sales career depends on your ability to focus on the exact opposite of technology’s value; you have to master human value.” It’s a point well taken, expressed with verve and passion by an author with relevant experience on the B2B battlefield. Nielsen’s premise—human-to-human, or “H2H,” selling creates value that can’t be duplicated by “bots”—is timely, relevant, and, for some sales professionals, sobering. She finely hones her argument by demonstrating, through examples of right and wrong techniques, the importance of truly understanding each customer’s needs and customizing the sales approach to meet them. Mastery of H2H involves making a commitment to delivering “personalized value,” which, Nielsen writes, is “the main reason why high performers consistently outperform everyone else.” Not surprisingly, this is no easy task, so the author offers authoritative counsel on the psychology behind H2H selling. Perhaps the most striking metaphor in the manual, borrowed from a social psychologist, is “the rider, elephant, and path,” in which the rider signifies the rational mind, the elephant represents emotion, and the path denotes the customer’s road to value (or, for the salesperson, a signed contract). Nielsen does a superb job relating this recurring metaphor, which anchors her own training approach to the complex nature of B2B selling. But the inspirational book goes beyond the metaphor, exploring how to ask effective, “high impact,” open-ended questions; discussing ways to engender the customer’s trust; reinforcing the concept of authenticity; and suggesting strategies for becoming indispensable. While some of the material in the guide is unduly repetitive, the core message of becoming “a purveyor of value” probably can’t be stated often enough. If getting B2B salespeople to think differently is her goal, Nielsen brilliantly succeeds.
Candid, compassionate, and brimming with pertinent, practical sales advice.Pub Date: June 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0345-5
Page Count: 212
Publisher: LDK Advisory Services
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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