Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The most practical, actionable book I have ever read on the subject, April 9, 2006
I met Bob Schmonsees recently when he and I were both speaking at an industry event. Before ever reading this book, it was clear from our conversation that Bob is an extremely experienced and bright marketing mind. This book proved it.
Over the last decade, we have been bombarded with tons of useless charges like, "We need to become customer-focused", "We need to focus on solving our clients' business problems", and other meaninglessly lofty corporate platitudes. Furthermore, we all have bookshelves full of tomes that lay out elegant strategies for acheiving those goals - books that philosophize more than instruct.
This book takes those strategic objectives down to the tactical level where most of us in the business world live. It provides actionable, step-by-step advice on how marketing managers can create tremendous value for their salespeople by giving them the information and guidance that they have desperately needed since the advent of consultative selling. If you follow the processes in this book, your customers will breathe a sigh of relief as your salespeople begin to sound smarter about their business issues and provide more value as trusted problem-solvers.
Other reviewers will give detailed accounts of what is inside this book, but let me offer that I have spent years helping clients struggle with these issues, and this is the most useful and practical book I have seen on the subject.
If your salespeople are missing the mark with your customers, 'Escaping the Black Hole' will provide you with a means to help them ask the right questions, uncover the real problems, propose the right solutions, impress more customers, and close more deals.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Visionary as well as prescriptive, November 18, 2005
This book is simultaneously visionary and prescriptive. It's must reading in our organization.
The author's assertion that fixing the marketing/sales disconnect will become as important in the next decade as quality and customer focus has been in the last couple of decades is compelling. He lays out strong explanations for the problems as well as their impact on businesses.
This book provides a compelling vision for implementing solution selling, methods for aligning marketing and sales, and prescriptions for specific actions to improve business-to-business selling effectiveness.
We have begun implementing specific recommendations such as "value mapping", and found them extremely useful. We see this as a key instrument to get marketing and sales aligned to the best common messages, all centered on how we provide value to customers.
The idea of "institutionalizing the organization's understanding of customer needs" is powerful, as is the consideration that the facts, insights, and opinions behind the value messages and best sales practices are "the marketing and sales dna of the enterprise".
The only thing missing are more examples of company experiences implementing these compelling ideas.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great read with a practical blueprint for moving forward!, June 13, 2005
This book is truly a must read for any mid- to upper-level manager in Marketing as well as company Executives! Unlike many books out there today, it provides real world analysis of the situation today within Marketing and Sales departments and then presents the reader with a practical blueprint that company's can begin to use to reduce the communication black hole between Marketing and Sales.
A cornerstone of the book is the need for company's to begin treating their Marketing and Sales content as a core asset. The author challenges the reader to begin thinking of their content in manageable chunks with a foundation based upon the needs of the constituents to which they are trying to sell their product. While the outside-in and solution selling approaches are not new, the concept of applying them to the content that the Marketing department creates and manages is new. While there are many great books out there for Marketing and Sales professionals to read on outside-in marketing or solution selling, there is often a disconnect as to what next and how to begin from a practical perspective. The value of this book is that it presents a real-world plan that company's can begin to implement on their own as to how to apply these valuable concepts and begin acting upon them - starting with their content as the foundation!
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