How Clients Buy: A Practical Guide to Business Development for Consulting and Professional Services


Tom McMakin - 2018
    If you're one of the millions of people whose skills are the 'product, ' you know that you cannot be successful unless you bring in clients. The problem is, you're trained to do your job--not sell it. No matter how great you may be at your actual role, you likely feel a bit lost, hesitant, or 'behind' when it comes to courting clients, an unfamiliar territory where you're never quite sure of the line between under- and over-selling. This book comes to the rescue with real, practical advice for selling what you do. You'll have to unlearn everything you know about sales, but then you'll learn new skills that will help you make connections, develop rapport, create interest, earn trust, and turn prospects into clients.Business development is critical to your personal success, and your skills in this area will dictate the course of your career. This invaluable guide gives you a set of real-world best practices that can help you become the rainmaker you want to be.Get the word out and make productive connections Drop the fear of self-promotion and advertise your accomplishments Earn potential clients' trust to build a lasting relationship Scrap the sales pitch in favor of honesty, positivity, and value Working in the consulting and professional services fields comes with difficulties not encountered by those who sell tangible products. Services are often under-valued, and become among the first things to go when budgets get tight. It is now harder than ever to sell professional services, so your game must be on-point if you hope to out-compete the field. How Clients Buy shows you how to level up and start winning the client list of your dreams.

Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work


Alison Green - 2018
    Thankfully, Green does—and in this incredibly helpful book, she tackles the tough discussions you may need to have during your career. You’ll learn what to say when• coworkers push their work on you—then take credit for it• you accidentally trash-talk someone in an email then hit “reply all”• you’re being micromanaged—or not being managed at all• you catch a colleague in a lie• your boss seems unhappy with your work• your cubemate’s loud speakerphone is making you homicidal• you got drunk at the holiday party

Creating Magic


Lee Cockerell - 2008
    The secret for creating magic in our careers, our organizations, and our lives is simple: outstanding leadership--the kind that inspires employees, delights customers, and achieves extraordinary business results. No one knows more about this kind of leadership than Lee Cockerell, the man who ran Walt Disney World(R) Resort operations for over a decade. And in Creating Magic, he shares the leadership principles that not only guided his own journey from a poor farm boy in Oklahoma to the head of operations for a multibillion dollar enterprise, but that also soon came to form the cultural bedrock of the world's number one vacation destination. But as Lee demonstrates, great leadership isn't about mastering impossibly complex management theories. We can all become outstanding leaders by following the ten practical, common sense strategies outlined in this remarkable book. As straightforward as they are profound, these leadership lessons include: Everyone is important.Make your people your brand. Burn the free fuel: appreciation, recognition, and encouragement. Give people a purpose, not just a job. Combining surprising business wisdom with insightful and entertaining stories from Lee's four decades on the front lines of some of the world's best-run companies, Creating Magic shows all of us - from small business owners to managers at every level - how to become better leaders by infusing quality, character, courage, enthusiasm, and integrity into our workplace and into our lives.

Rock Your Network Marketing Business: How to Become a Network Marketing Rock Star


Sarah Robbins - 2013
    Six-and-seven-figure success certainly didn't happen overnight. It wasn't easy; it was certainly worth it.

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered


Austin Kleon - 2014
    Now, in an even more forward-thinking and necessary book, he shows how to take that critical next step on a creative journey—getting known. Show Your Work! is about why generosity trumps genius. It’s about getting findable, about using the network instead of wasting time “networking.” It’s not self-promotion, it’s self-discovery—let others into your process, then let them steal from you. Filled with illustrations, quotes, stories, and examples, Show Your Work! offers ten transformative rules for being open, generous, brave, productive. In chapters such as You Don’t Have to Be a Genius; Share Something Small Every Day; and Stick Around, Kleon creates a user’s manual for embracing the communal nature of creativity— what he calls the “ecology of talent.” From broader life lessons about work (you can’t find your voice if you don’t use it) to the etiquette of sharing—and the dangers of oversharing—to the practicalities of Internet life (build a good domain name; give credit when credit is due), it’s an inspiring manifesto for succeeding as any kind of artist or entrepreneur in the digital age.

The Visual MBA: Two Years of Business School Packed into One Priceless Book of Pure Awesomeness


Jason Barron - 2019
    Along the way, rather than taking boring notes that he would never read (nor use) again, Jason created sketch notes for each class—visually capturing the essential points of his education—and providing an engaging and invaluable resource.   Once finished with his MBA, Jason launched a widely successful Kickstarter campaign distilling these same notes into a self-published book to help aspiring business leaders of all backgrounds and income levels understand the critical concepts one learns in business school.   Whether you are thinking about applying to business school, are currently in college studying business, or have always wondered what is taught in an MBA program, this highly entertaining and visual book is for you.

How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know


Byron Sharp - 2010
    Tackling issues such as how brands grow, how advertising really works, what price promotions really do & how loyalty programs really affect loyalty.

Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear


Frank Luntz - 2006
    With chapters like "The Ten Rules of Successful Communication" and "The 21 Words and Phrases for the 21st Century," he examines how choosing the right words is essential. Nobody is in a better position to explain than Frank Luntz: He has used his knowledge of words to help more than two dozen Fortune 500 companies grow. Hell tell us why Rupert Murdoch's six-billion-dollar decision to buy DirectTV was smart because satellite was more cutting edge than "digital cable," and why pharmaceutical companies transitioned their message from "treatment" to "prevention" and "wellness." If you ever wanted to learn how to talk your way out of a traffic ticket or talk your way into a raise, this book's for you.

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms


Danielle LaPorte - 2012
       As the creator of DanielleLaPorte.com--deemed “the best place online for kick-ass spirituality,” Danielle LaPorte’s straight-talk life-and-livelihood sermons have been read by over one million people. Bold but empathetic, she reframes popular self-help and success concepts:   : Life balance is a myth, and the pursuit of it is causing us more stress then the craving for balance itself. : Being well-rounded is over-rated. When you focus on developing your true strengths, you enter your mastery zone. : Screw your principles (they might be holding you back). : We have ambition backwards. Getting clear on how you want to feel in your life + work is more important than setting goals. It's the most potent form of clarity that you can have, and it's what leads to true fulfillment.

Hitting the Sweet Spot: How Consumer Insights Can Inspire Better Marketing and Advertising


Lisa Fortini-Campbell - 2001
    Clear and engaging - written by one of the top professionals in consumer insight. The book takes you through the process step by step - from Data to Information to Insight to Inspiration. This book is used worldwide by both students and professionals.

The Machine: A Radical Approach to the Design of the Sales Function


Justin Roff-Marsh - 2015
    Roff-Marsh calls these executives his silent revolutionaries. This revolution has been brewing for a long time. For the last 20 years, organizations’ ability to produce has overtaken their ability to sell, and, for at least as long, customers have unfailingly embraced every opportunity to avoid interacting with traditional field salespeople. Applying the division of labor to sales might not seem controversial, but this innocent-sounding idea decimates the sales management orthodoxy and replaces it with a strange new world where sales is primarily an inside activity, where salespeople earn fixed salaries and focus their attention exclusively on selling conversations, where regional sales offices become redundant, and where marketing and engineering become seamlessly integrated with sales.The Machine is a field guide for the executive who’s prepared to wrestle sales away from autonomous field-based artisans in favor of a tightly synchronized team of specialists. Readers will embrace The Machine either to exploit the new sales order or to avoid falling victim to it.

A Passion for Success


Kazuo Inamori - 1995
    Topics include: making the right decisions; how to enhance work; and managing a meaningful business. It aims to identify key principles for business success.

The Most Productive People in History: 18 Extraordinarily Prolific Inventors, Artists, and Entrepreneurs, From Archimedes to Elon Musk


Michael Rank - 2015
    Few composers write more than one or two symphonies in their lifetimes. Beethoven spent a year on his shorter symphonies but more than six years on his 9th Symphony. But Georg Philipp Telemann composed at least 200 overtures in a two-year period. Over his lifetime Telemann's oeuvre consists of more than 3,000 pieces, although “only” 800 survive to this day. He was not the only person whose productivity defied all reason. Greek scientist Archimedes discovered mathematical phenomena that weren't confirmed for 17 centuries. Isaac Newton invented classical physics and was one of the inventors of calculus. Benjamin Franklin wrote, published, politicked, invented, experimented, and humored, sometimes all at the same time. Theodore Roosevelt was the first American to earn a belt in judo, hunted, wrote numerous books, and read four hours a day, even during the busiest moments of his political life. This book will explore the lives of the 18 most productive people in history. We will look at the cultures into which they were born and see the methods that they used to achieve such sweeping results. Perhaps we can also create enough time to focus on the tasks in life that are truly meaningful.

The Extra One Per Cent: How Small Changes Make Exceptional People


Rob Yeung - 2010
    Discover what these successful people do differently and find out how you too can reach outstanding levels of success.

How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back from Your Next Raise, Promotion, or Job


Sally Helgesen - 2018
    But a few years ago, he realized that while some of the habits he outlined in What Got You Here apply to both men and women, women face specific, and different, challenges as they seek to advance in their careers.So he partnered with his longtime colleague, women’s leadership expert Sally Helgesen, to create this invaluable handbook for women trying to take the next step in their careers. They realized that for women in particular, the very skills and habits that made them successful early in their careers could actually be holding them back as they advance to the next stage of their working lives. Women in particular struggle with habits like:1. Reluctance to Claim Your Achievements2. Expecting Others to Spontaneously Notice and Reward Your Hard Work3. Overvaluing Expertise4. Building Rather than Leveraging Relationships5. Failing to Enlist Allies from Day One6. Putting Your Job Before Your Career7. The Disease to Please8. The Perfection Trap9. Minimizing10. Too Much11. Ruminating12. Letting Your Radar Distract YouLike the original What Got You Here, this new book will help women identify specific behaviors that keep them from realizing their full potential, no matter what stage they are in their career. It will also help them identify why what worked for them in the past will not necessarily get them where they want to go in the future–and how to finally shed those behaviors so they can advance to the next level, whatever that may be.