Best Selling Books In Marketing And Sales

Joseph Michelli is one of the world's top authorities on creating an organizational culture dedicated to service excellence. In Prescription for Excellence, Michelli provides an in-depth look at the UCLA Health System and explains how you can use the same approach to dominate your own industry. UCLA Health system is known worldwide for its outstanding patient care and great staff and their overall success is driven by an organization-wide collaboration of visionary leaders. By breaking down the UCLA approach into five principles, Michelli shows you how to achieve similar goals by translating these steps into your own industry.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell explores the astounding phenomenon of when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. He describes the way tipping points have begun changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and spreading ideas. Through simple yet entertaining explanations, Gladwell explores this relatively new occurrence in the context of today's markets. Robert B. Cialdini's bestseller, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, explores the psychological foundations of marketing. Whether you are a consumer or someone trying to urge others to buy or vote for your product, this is an essential read to navigate the minds of consumers. This book will resonate with readers and strike chords deep in their psyche. Readers will be able to use Cialdini's theories on their own consumers in order to persuade them to buy their products.

In his first book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Tony Hsieh, the iconoclastic CEO of Zappos, the online shoe retailer, explains how he created a culture with a commitment to service that improves the lives of its employers, customers, vendors, and backers. Drawing on anecdotes and stories from his own life experiences and the experiences of other companies, Hsieh connects with you by providing concrete ways that you and your company can achieve monumental success like Zappos. By providing details of the unique customer care practices of Zappos, Hsieh underscores the importance of company culture in order to bring forward great customer service and long-term branding. Delivering Happiness provides an account of Zappos employees and how their use Zappos' Core Values outside of work to bring happiness to their personal lives.

Gary Vaynerchuk's The Thank You Economy is about something greater than a single revolutionary platform. It is about the way we communicate, buy, and sell and the way consumers interact online and offline. This type of economy was born on the Internet and has given consumers back their voices by providing them with tremendous opinion-forming power through social media. Vaynerchuk describes how today companies must compete on a whole different level than they used to. Customers demand more from companies making it imperative for companies to provide excellent customer service and find compelling ways to grab customer attention. Vaynerchuk reveals the ways in which companies can become more personal to their entire customer base using social media. By offering data-driven evidence, this book shows that by harnessing the word-of-mouth power derived from social media can help companies profit and grow more than ever before.

Roberto Sedycias works as an IT consultant for PoloMercantil

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Review - Do It Yourself Business Sales Guidebook

Do It Yourself Business Sales Guidebook, Ben Brickweg, 2011, ISBN 9781456568764

The easy part is to decide when to sell your small business; the hard part is knowing how to do it. This book makes that process much easier to navigate.

First of all, why are you selling? If it is to get enough money to retire to Florida or Arizona (or the south of France), giving the business to your children is probably not a good idea. Get an accountant and tax attorney (if you have not already done so); you are going to need them. Obviously, keep it quiet. The last thing you want is for your employees, suppliers and/or customers to be running for the hills in panic. Get rid of all old or obsolete inventory, and give the facility a thorough cleaning.

There are several financial reports that you will need, but the two most important ones are a Balance Sheet and a Profit and Loss statement for the past several years. Make sure that they are absolutely accurate. It's tempting to fool with the "books" in order to make your business look more profitable than it really is. It's also a really bad idea; your deception will be exposed, sooner or later. Besides, showing a "down" year is not the worst thing in the world.

The book looks at things to consider when you are coming up with an asking price. You need to get on the Internet, and look up the asking price of comparable businesses that are up for sale. If your asking price is noticeably higher than the "average" price, reduce your price accordingly. You can count on a potential buyer doing the same search, and asking why they should pay more for your widget company than for a comparable widget company.

Put some time and effort into the marketing materials that will get potential buyers interested in your business. Get help if you need it. Find the right magazines and websites to place your advertisement. Keep track of everyone who shows interest. If they seem legitimate, send them a Confidential Business Plan, which gives some, but not all, details of your business, right after they sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement. If they object, they are not a legitimate buyer, and you can cross them off the list. Serious buyers know that an NDA is part of the procedure, and will have no problem in signing it.

This book covers the rest of the process, from negotiating terms of the deal (compromise is the important word), to due diligence (where you are obligated to reveal all of your business, good or bad), to ensuring a new transition to the new owners. It also comes with a number of checklists and worksheets, to make the process as painless as possible.

For anyone who is even contemplating selling their small business, this book is very highly recommended. It's easy to say that you will never sell your business; life has a way of making that decision for you. This is equally recommended for anyone thinking of buying a small business; it does a very good job of showing what the seller is thinking and seeking.

Paul Lappen is a freelance book reviewer whose blog, http://www.deadtreesreview.blogspot.com/, emphasizes small press and self-published books.

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