I just finished reading a book by Robert Shemin called How Come That Idiot’s Rich and I’m Not?

I had not heard of the author before but found that he’s a best-selling writer and a sort of rags to riches story who writes that he was one of those people who earlier in life would easily have been considered the least likely to succeed. He refers to himself as a Rich Idiot and uses this theme throughout the book to distinguish between rich people who aren’t as smart as many intelligent people who aren’t as rich.

In a nutshell, he talks about becoming your own boss and working for yourself and not others. He discusses how to focus your efforts on investing in stocks, real estate and businesses which is how he made his fortune. Personally I was most interested in his thoughts on real estate since it’s an interest of mine too (not the other subjects aren’t) and like others I’ve read, he advocates a system of buying property, renting them out, and developing positive cash flows in this way.

He discusses how to use debt properly (ie. use other people’s money to make your money), how to think and live like a millionaire and he advocates focusing on one goal not numerous ones. The ultimate goal is to become rich or more specifically a Rich Idiot, just like him.

Personally I thought that the book started out very strongly but ended up discussing a number of things I’ve read in other books. Like other self-help books I’ve read, he talks about writing things down and documenting them. Write down the material things you desire, write down people who can help you achieve your goal(s), make a list of your assets/liabilities, etc. Putting things into writing tends to mean that you’ll remember it plus you can refer to on a regular basis to remain committed to achieving everything you desire.

Given his self-described status as someone who finished near the bottom of his class it was interesting to read his thoughts on how many smart people often over think things and get bogged down on details while someone like him is more likely to just go and do it without over analyzing the situation. This is something I often do myself so I appreciated the comments.

If you’re looking for some ideas that perhaps you haven’t considered and getting the perspective of a successful person who has done it already, this book might be for you. It’s an easy read and has summaries of tasks for you to do at the end of each chapter and throughout the book in general.

I just finished reading The Psychology Of Selling: The Art of Closing Sales by Brian Tracy.

I’ve seen Brian Tracy live in person twice through through the Peak Performers network. I had not heard of him before joining Peak Performers but then again I hadn’t really heard of any of the other major speakers who I’ve seen since then as I’d never really paid any attention to motivational speakers like this before.

If you’ve not heard of Brian Tracy, he’s a high school dropout who began working laboring jobs and essentially backed into a sales career and learned the business initially by being told that sales was a numbers game and he just had to make lots of calls to be successful. Eventually he started asking successful sales reps how it was that they’d become successful as he noticed that many of the successful reps didn’t seem to view sales as a numbers game and that their strategy seemed to be more organized and sophisticated. He started talking less and asking more questions and found that that’s when his sales started to increase.

Over time, he perfected his strategies by using what he’d learned from other successful sales people, used common sense and listened to what his customers wanted. He kept repeating what worked and concentrated on selling benefits to his customers and not features as many sales people often do.

Granted, when you see speakers like this in person, the hardest task is usually keeping track of how many of their CDs and books they plug during their speech and avoiding buying every products of theirs that they hawk. In the case of Brian Tracy though, I do like his style and I found this book to be very useful.

As the title would suggest, the book concentrates on the psychology of selling and learning (as the book says) about how people think and why they buy. As a person who sells myself, it’s interesting to be reminded that sitting with a sales prospect and listing every benefit that your product or service offers doesn’t necessarily mean that your prospect will be interested or “sold” on what you offer.

One of the parts of the book that I’ll remember is when Tracy reminds the reader that suggesting that a product or service is high quality and priced right aren’t benefits, they’re givens. We assume these days that products are good quality and reasonably priced otherwise the company probably won’t be in business very long.

True benefits relate to what the product does for the customer and how it makes their life easier.

In a career sense, this book is useful even to people who aren’t in sales-based roles since we all sell ourselves during our career and in job interviews specifically. To follow up with the comment I referred to above, mentioning many of the things you’ve done in your career won’t necessarily cause a hiring manager to want you interview you or hire you. As mentioned above, they have hot buttons too (something Tracy also discusses in the book) and they’ll perk up when you mention things that are relevant to them and to their business.

Even if you aren’t in a sales role and have no intention of ever being in one, this book can help you learn selling strategies that can positively contribute to your long term career success.

When it comes to career-related products on the Net, there are certainly plenty to choose from but whether or not they work is another story. I’ve read plenty of so-called career experts who when you look at it don’t necessarily offer anything worth paying for.

One of the better career resources that I’m aware of is the Amazing Cover Letters product from Jimmy Sweeney.

If you’re the type of person who finds it hard to write about yourself or write cover letters specifically this might be a resource for you to check out. Jimmy’s product has been around for a number of years now and I recall trading a few emails with him a couple of years back asking him about the product and what makes it a success. He has spent an number of years working on it and perfecting it and offers some interesting testimonials and comments that might shed light on why it’s helped other people with their careers and job searches.

Jimmy’s website does a good job of explaining the product and why you might consider using it if you’re having trouble writing cover letters or want to do a better job of it.

I just finished reading Donald Trump’s book Trump Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges into Success.

I’ve read a few of Donald Trump’s books before and quite like them. I don’t watch The Apprentice although I have seen if a few times and I wouldn’t say I’m a huge fan of his but I have liked reading his books. One thing about his books is that he names names. He also doesn’t seem to mind talking about both successes and failures, as he does in this book.

As the book title would suggest, this particular book focuses on mistakes he’s made and challenges he’s faced, how he learned from them and in some cases, how he turned the challenging situation around for the better.

One of his failures appears in the first chapter when he discusses his near bankruptcy in the early 1990s and how he rebounded from it.

Another failure was his Trump Shuttle airline service also from the early 1990s.

Too bad the book was written in 2008 otherwise he could have added his recent failed financial backing of Affliction’s foray into Mixed Martial Arts events, too…

Nevertheless, I like reading his books because he doesn’t (to me anyways) come across as the often cheesy motivational speakers do. He does try to motivate you but in a professional way and in a way that I think doesn’t come across as arrogant. He does talk a lot about money and his houses and stuff like that but does discuss mistakes he has made and what he learned from them.

In this particular book he also lists teaching points at the end of chapters called Coach Trump where he summarizes the story in the chapter and what we can learn from it.

Having said that it is interesting reading his positive take on some of the projects he owns that have performed poorly (ie. Miss America pageants) and his current golf course project in Scotland which has raised the ire of environmentalists. He always somehow manages to make things look successful from his perspective anyways.

All in all, even if you’re not a fan of Donald Trump you still can get some good mileage from a book like this.

If you’ve been reading my recent book reviews – you can check them all out in the Product and Book Reviews section on the right hand Categories menu – you’ll see that a number of the recent entries have been about advertising and negotiating.

I just finished another advertising book called Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy.

If his last name sounds familiar it’s because he founded the advertising company that is now globally known as Ogilvy & Mather.

While working in New Zealand for Telecom New Zealand in their Business Marketing group, I had the opportunity to work closely with both Ogilvy & Mather and Saatchi & Saatchi and got to see how the ad business works albeit from a client’s perspective.

Advertising has always fascinated me. As I’ve gotten older I find myself paying more attention to various advertising messages I see. Print ads, tv ads, radio ads and Internet advertising to name a few.

Certainly when David Ogilvy first wrote this book in 1963 the Internet certainly didn’t exist but he does refer to a number of the famous print ads and campaigns he and his company was responsible for.

The famous Dove soap ad – “Only Dove is one-quarter moisturizing cream” – was one of his most successful and enduring ads. The American Express “don’t leave home without it” tagline was another.

The book shows his beginnings as a young ad man in London and follows his career to the US where he became famous.

Although the book was first written over 45 years ago, I did take away a number of things that are certainly applicable today that he mentions as being important to his success:

1. He only worked with companies whose products he actually used. He listed major clients of his such as Rolls-Royce, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Dove and others and how he uses all of their products personally.

2. He only worked with companies whose products he liked and believed in. A further to point #1.

3. He only worked with clients that made sense for him to work with. He wasn’t afraid to fire clients who were too difficult to work with or ones where he wasn’t profitable.

4. He wouldn’t work with clients when he felt that their current advertising agency was doing a better job than his agency could do. I thought that one was very interesting: he wouldn’t take a client if he felt his company couldn’t outperform their current agency.

One of the things I really liked about the book was that he names names. He gives specific examples of companies and of situations where he fired clients or refused to work with them for whatever reason.

He gave one example to illustrate how he hated working with industry associations and in this instance, was invited to attend a pitch with a number of other agencies who were competing for the business of a rayon industry association. At the beginning of the presentation, he was told he had exactly 15 minutes to complete his presentation at which time the head of the rayon association’s search committee would ring a bell (!) signifying that his time was up and that the next ad agency’s 15 minutes had started.

After asking the committee a few questions about their requirements, their ad approval process and their budget – and realizing that he really didn’t want to work with these people – he said “ring the bell!” and left without doing his pitch.

In other words he fired them before they even hired him.

From a sales perspective there were a number of key points in the book that anyone in advertising or sales – or anyone who is interested in these fields – would find interesting.

Just like we’ve learned that in sales you need to deal directly with the decision maker and not one of their underlings, David Ogilvy also believed that if you had to deal with too many decision makers – which was just one of the reasons he didn’t bother with the rayon association – you were probably better off letting someone else deal with them.

I just finished reading Hypnotic Writing: How to Seduce and Persuade Customers with Only Your Words by Joe Vitale. I first became aware of Joe Vitale from his work as a very successful Internet website copyright guru.

I’d contacted him several years to enquire about having him write an Internet sales letter for a website I was managing at the time but he was already booked months in advance and instead asked if I’d be interested to work with one of his associates. She ended up doing a really great job for us.

With Internet copy and with advertising in general, you often read statistics about how many words on a page get read, how many people bother to read past the headline of an ad and how the headline alone can make the difference between an ad that gets read and one that doesn’t, which of course then translates into products that get bought versus ones that don’t.

In the book, Joe Vitale discusses his secrets for writing copy that persuades ie. it persuades people to do something or more to the point, to buy something. This is how the hypnosis part comes in. He refers to how people have the stereotypical image of hypnosis, the classic scene where the hypnotist starts waving a watch or other item in front of the subject’s face and gets them to fall into a trance but in his book he talks about how hypnosis is nothing ike that at all, at least not in a writing sense.

Instead, he talks about your choice of words and how the structure of your copy can persuade people to read what you’ve written and end up purchasing what it is that you’re selling because they see the need and see the value in it. In that regard, he doesn’t advocate lying or being deceptive in any way but rather that you engage your reader and cause them to want to read what you’ve written rather than ignoring it or glossing over it as is often the case with advertising as mentioned above.

He gives examples of copy that he’s rewritten so that you can see the difference between the before (ie. boring) and after (ie. hypnotic) version. His versions tend to be more engaging, more personal and are ones that tell a story that you just want to keep reading. His style of writing may not suit everyone but it sure does make sense the way he describes it.

He practices what he preaches too. He refers to various methods to ensure your copy stands out and gets read – from obvious methods like the use of bullet points, short paragraphs, selected bolded and italicized words, etc – and also how certain words and phrases get noticed and get read.

On the issue of short paragraphs of perhaps 2-3 sentences each, he also extends this to the chapters in his book: some of his chapters are only 2-4 pages long.

He discusses the hypnotic power of repetition – how many times have you read that an ad needs to be seen 6 or 7 times on average before people remember it? He discusses how to repeat your message in different ways to get your reader to remember it.

How can this sort of learning be used in a career sense?

Certainly, we all advertise ourselves during our career whether in our current job or when we’re looking for a new one. Understanding our target market – a potential hiring manager or a potential client for example – is an important aspect of any person’s career and some of us are better at marketing ourselves than others.

These days, we’re bombarded with advertising messages, thousands of them daily. This book takes you behind the scenes and into the head of a very successful advertising guru and shows you how to ensure your message gets heard and remembered.

I just finished reading The Secrets of Power Selling: 101 Tips to Help You Improve Your Sales Results by Kelley Robertson, who offers 101 tips “to help improve your sales results.”

Each chapter is titled as a power – The Power of Guarantees, The Power of Passion – and in each chapter, the author explains the relationship to selling in the form of a secret, 101 secrets in all.

As with many sales books, even if you’re not in sales you can learn a lot and apply it to your own career. The first tip in the book is called The Power of Adapting Your Approach which can certainly apply during a job interview when you go in expecting a certain type of interview and end up with something completely different and therefore need to quickly adjust.

The author is a trainer with over 20 years of experience training retail, hospitality, sales and other staff. I found his writing to be easy to follow and the advice – while in some cases a repetition of things I’ve read elsewhere – still very useful regardless of whether you work in sales or not.

When his chapters discuss topics like trust, planning, focus and enthusiasm in a sales environment, it’s pretty clear how you can apply these same topics – and the importance of each – to your own career.

He opens each chapter with a quote related to the topic to help the frame it and you give you an example of how the topic relates to sales which I found helpful.

Each chapter closes with a sales tip – advice, takeways and tasks for you to do – to help ensure you’re successfully mastering the topic being discussed.

Bullet points, bolded text, quotes and other devices help the important parts stand out. The chapters – each secret – are relatively short so you can pick up the book, read some, put it away and come back to it later as you like.

All in all I found the book to be an interesting read and I can take away a number of the topics that I’ll remember to focus on in the manner that the author discusses.

I just finished reading No More Cold Calling(TM): The Breakthrough System That Will Leave Your Competition in the Dust by Joanne Black. In the book, the author discusses how salespeople can ditch cold calling and turn their sales pipeline into one that is almost entirely or perhaps entirely made up of referrals. This would certainly come as welcome news to anyone who has ever picked up the phone to make a cold call or who colds calls on a regular basis.

Certainly cold calling can be one of the hardest sales skills to perfect. For starters, many people are simply scared of picking up the phone and calling someone cold. The thought of speaking with someone who doesn’t know you and isn’t expecting your call isn’t the most pleasant thing in the world to do. From a numbers perspective it tends not to be the most productive or high yield way to pick up customers. The author suggests that cold calling often yields around a 2% conversion rate. I’ve read stats that suggest that direct mail is around 0.5% by comparison. The author suggests that referrals on the other hand can often yield up to a 50% conversion rate.

The book walks you through a strategy to start immediately whereby you begin to change the way you work as a salesperson and only start working with prospects, people who have been referred to you. The author discusses how to set up a referral system by tapping into former and current contacts and also by buddying up with another salesperson perhaps in a different field to share referrals, share ideas and provide motivation for each other.

She also gets you in the mode of offering up referrals too. Throughout the book she mentions various companies she has dealt with successfully including an insurance company and a stationary company and she gives you their URL so that you can contact them if you need their help. In other words, she doesn’t just ask for referrals, she gives them too.

I can certainly see how this strategy might work for many sorts of salespeople such as real estate agents and financial planners for example. These people can presumably deal with anyone they like and aren’t necessarily constrained by sales territories, protected accounts and things of that nature.

In that regard, this is one area where I think a salesperson might have difficulty employing this strategy. If you work in a sales environment that operates with a strict territory system or where you are handed leads and aren’t allowed to contact leads that are “owned” by one of your colleagues, I suspect this referral strategy could be a hard one to enact. If you work in a wide open sales environment and can contact anyone you choose, then the system could certainly help you immensely.

The book does provide some good ammunition at a minimum of why asking for referrals consistently should help to build your business and make you less likely to have to rely on cold calling – if at all – for new and repeat business.

Upon finishing the book I did think of all the major items I’ve purchased or arranged through someone in the last few years – life insurance, mortgage, financial investments to name a few – and I can’t think of one occasion where the person called me up at any time asking for referrals. I plan on doing a better job of asking for referrals in my own life, and offering up referrals when appropriate too.

I just finished reading Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In the 1981 book on negotiation by Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton.

The first thing you have to get past with this book is that since it was originally written in 1981, many of the references and examples are dated. In terms of the jist of the book itself, it discusses the concept of negotiation in terms of a mutual beneficial for all parties.

In other words, it’s the win-win strategy. This win-win model has been mentioned many time in real life and you’ve probably come across people who love using this cliche too.

I’ve heard some pro sports general managers commenting on the win-win strategy as being a fair one that they are happy with when making a trade with another team ie. if they make a trade that makes sense in the long term for both teams, both teams are more likely to want to make another trade in the future. This is as opposed to a situation where one team ends up getting fleeced in the deal and are therefore hesitant to ever deal with the opposing GM again.

Personally, I’d think that most GMs of teams and people in general would be more worried about negotiating fairly and winning the deal at the end of the day since they might not be in the job long enough to be around for future deals…

Overall, I found the book harder to read than I did Start With NO. When I say harder, I mean only in the sense that I had a hard time wanting to read every word on every page of this book and found myself skimming it mostly. I think in hindsight I should have read it second and read Start With NO first since that’s the order in which they were written and also because Jim Camp – the author of Start With NO – makes (uncomplimentary) references to Getting To Yes and structures his thoughts in opposition to it.

Still, I’m glad I read it but would have to say that I think I sit closer to Jim Camp’s methods and thoughts on the subject of negotiation than I do with the authors of Getting To Yes. Perhaps back in the early 1980s the concepts that Getting To Yes made sense and were relevant but I think a lot has changed since then and part of that involves a change in how people think and deal with other people too.

Plus, the world has gotten a lot smaller than before, people seem to have shorter attention spans and many people do often only look out for themselves which sometimes means you not only have to be wary of this, but also take it into account when dealing with people like this.

Would I recommend reading Getting To Yes? Sure, if you have the time.

Having said that, the first line of the Conclusion section states “There is probably nothing in this book that you did not already know at some level of your experience” so perhaps even the authors knew they weren’t onto something new!

I just finished reading Start with NO by Jim Camp and found it to be an excellent book and very relevant to anyone in sales or who wants to learn about negotiating.

I first talked about this book several days ago in an earlier post.

All in all it was an excellent read for me because I found the topic interesting and I saw value in how things were presented in terms of negotiating in various situation that I’ll found myself in.

A few particular things I walked away with and will definitely remember are:

1. Only deal with the decision makers. Don’t waste time dealing with people who can’t make the final decision. Understand who ALL the decision makers are too.

2. Never start negotiating without first having a valid agenda. What’s the point of the negotiation and what do you want to accomplish?

3. Remember to keep the person you’re negotiating with in the centre of the emotion pendulum. Don’t let them too negative or too excited. That part might be hard to believe but once you read the reason, it makes perfect sense.

4. You don’t need the deal, you want it. Don’t start counting your money before the dealing’s done…to paraphrase The Gambler.

5. Decisions are 100% emotional. I’ve read this before and it’s probably very true when you think about it.

One of the books that Mr. Camp disagrees with strongly is Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In…so I’ve decided to read that one too.

My comments on this book will follow in the next few days.