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Book Review: Selling the
Wheel, Jeff Cox and Howard Stevens.
Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-671-03310-7
Selling the Wheel is written as a novel set in the ancient world.
It tells the story of Max, who invents the wheel. Max finds it tough
to sell a wheel to someone who has never seen one. Max discovers
that, at the birth of a market, selling needs special skills. He
hires Cassius the closer, who creates dreams of wheeling for prospective
customers, resolves their objections and closes the deal. Max becomes
rich while Cassius wheels and deals.
However, as the wheel market matures, Max needs to change his sales
methods. The story takes us through three further market phases:
fast growth; incremental growth and maturity. For each phase a different
sales approach, and individual, works best. We meet Toby the Wizard;
Ben the Builder; and Caleb, the Captain of Sales; each of whom has
the technique that drives sales best in each phase of the market.
At the end of the novel Max is a billionaire!
Jeff Cox, co-writer of this entertaining book is co-author of The
Goal, a novel that popularised the OPT scheduling technology in
the mid 80's. This novel is even better. In both cases the message
is carried by a strong story and characters that the reader can
identify with. This shows how a fictitious story can be effective
at making points a reader will remember. Of course, the skill of
telling parables goes back to the New Testament!
Selling the Wheel is an excellent sales oriented companion to the
classic high technology marketing book Crossing
the Chasm. It provides an exemplary lesson on how to get people
to select appropriate go to market strategies for business lines.
Those who have to hire sales representatives will do well to study
the characteristics of Cassius, Toby, Ben, and Caleb, then look
for appropriate sales techniques.
Mike Evans
Also in this issue . . . .
| Feature
Article: |
Building
Bridges in Marketing: Mike Butcher
asks why marketing teams still seem unhappy despite the return
to growth?
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| Hot
Topic: |
The
future for RFID:
During
2003, the proposed adoption
of RFID (Radio Frequency
IDentification) technology by leading retailers such as Wal-Mart
and Tesco provoked a heated debate in the media, centred around
the capture of customer data and the freedom of the individual.
Bob Brown looks at what the introduction of this new technology
will really mean.
DevCon
2004 - CAA V5 Developer Forum is reviewed by Allan Behrens.
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