Jon Cooper: Wheat from the e-chaff
Jul 23 2010 By Jon Cooper
Everybody gets emails these days, many sadly unwanted, unneeded or just plain unwelcome. I’ve found a way to make up for the barrage of dross by making sure I get some nuggets of wisdom to liven up my send/receives.
What did I do? I found some brilliant blogs relevant to my work and my life, and subscribed to them. I’ll let you in on two of the very best right here:
l Seth Godin: This guy is a master marketer from NYC, writer of 12 bestselling books and all–round innovator. He invented the concept of permission marketing, where the business gives the user something “anticipated, personal and relevant”, arguing that most advertising (radio, TV, online pop-ups) is simply interruption marketing, and the hapless viewer or listener was doing something else of value before you foisted your unrequested message on him.
He’s also the founder of www.squidoo.com, now one of the 500 most visited sites in the world. Some more of Seth’s recent gems include a suggestion that we should maybe whizz through 200 slides for a 40 minute PowerPoint presentation, and that we should first try and make our customers smarter before we start to sell them anything.
This week I’ve also been reminded how we really don’t need offices anymore, and how most marketing is designed to please the wrong people (the boss, a critic, or loud customer).
The real beauty of Seth’s work is that it’s consistently challenging and exciting, and it always seems to arrive just when I need a lift. Check out http://sethgodin.typepad.com
l Jeffrey Gitomer: Regular readers will know I’ve long been a fan of this North Carolina native and three million-selling author. JG’s easy yet uncompromising style hammers its way into your consciousness on first reading, leaving you wondering why you never thought of things that way before. His weekly Sales Caffeine newsletter features a not-so-simple quiz to sharpen your chops, and lots of digestible snippets to remind you how easy it is to change the outcome of your client relationships. One memorable tip from last month – “price only matters in the absence of value”.
I discovered Gitomer when I bought his Little Red Book of Sales in an airport lounge in Chicago, and I was an instant convert. If your life involves selling anything to anybody, then JG will make it better. Subscribe today at www.salescaffeine.com
* Jon Cooper is a director of www.Sensiblemoney.co.uk
