Resources

Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets
by Michael T. Bosworth.
Hardcover, published in 1995

Avg. Customer Review:
Mike Bosworth and Solution Selling provides savy strategies and tactics that help solve the biggest problem between business and consumers today: misalignment. This book explains in detail what goes on during a sale and offers profound insight to the art of selling complex products. It is true that selling is just a simple name for the complex mental wars that happens between the buyer and the seller. This book helps one strategize his selling and predict customer behaviors. It also helps any sales person to be less emotional because he or she knows what stage is the customer in and can anticipate customer reactions.

Selling the Invisible : A Field Guide to Modern Marketing
by Harry Beckwith
Hardcover - 252 pages, published in March 1997

Avg. Customer Review:
In Selling the Invisible, Beckwith argues that what consumers are primarily interested in today are not features, but relationships. Even companies who think that they sell only tangible products should rethink their approach to product development and marketing and sales. For example, when a customer buys a Saturn automobile, what they're really buying is not the car, but the way that Saturn does business. Beckwith provides an excellent forum for thinking differently about the nature of services and how they can be effectively marketed. If you're at all involved in marketing or sales, then Selling the Invisible is definitely worth a look.

Inside the Tornado : Marketing Strategies from Silicon
Valley's Cutting Edge
by Geoffrey A. Moore
Paperback - 244 pages, reprint edition August 1999

Avg. Customer Review:
Inside the Tornado extends Moore's work with the Technology Adoption Life Cycle model to incorporate three distinct mainstream market stages - a pre-hypergrowth era of niche markets, the mass-market phenomenon of hypergrowth itself, and a post-hypergrowth era of mass customization. The critical success factor in each of these competitions, according to Moore, is to achieve "gorilla status" inside the tornado in order to be the market leader during the hypergrowth phase, which results in permanent advantages throughout the remainder of the life cycle. Timing is critical to this tornado strategy. Moore explains how to pool resources and gain supporters during the pre-tornado phase and then how to unleash them once the tornado hits.

Crossing the Chasm : Marketing and Selling High-Tech
Products to Mainstream Customers
by Geoffrey A. Moore, Regis McKenna (Introduction)
Paperback 227 pages, rev. edition August 1999

Avg. Customer Review:
Moore provides an invaluable service to high-tech entrepreneurs and investors: he has identified the weak link in the marketing chain which makes the success of such ventures so unpredictable, and he outlines proven, specific techniques to address this challenge. At a time when the high-tech community in the U.S. cedes much of its once-held manufacturing advantage to the Far East and elsewhere, it is critical that these U.S. enterprises must retain superior marketing as a competitive advantage.

Free Agent Nation : How America's New Independent
Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live
by Daniel H. Pink
Hardcover - 288 pages (April 2001)

Avg. Customer Review:
Not all "free agents" are highly paid athletes whose main skills are dunking a basketball or hitting a baseball. In fact, as Pink (contributing editor, Fast Company) reveals, over 25 million Americans are now self-employed, and fewer than one in ten works for a Fortune 500 company.