Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com


Aaron Ross - 2011
    This is NOT just another book about how to cold call or close deals. This is an entirely new kind of sales system for CEOs, entrepreneurs and sales VPs to help you build a sales machine. What does it take for your sales team to generate as many highly-qualified new leads as you want, create predictable revenue, and meet your financial goals without your constant focus and attention? Predictable Revenue has the answers!

Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy


Patrick Bet-David - 2020
    In this book, Patrick Bet-David “helps entrepreneurs understand exactly what they need to do next” (Brian Tracy, author of Eat That Frog!) by translating this skill into a valuable methodology. Whether you feel like you’ve hit a wall, lost your fire, or are looking for innovative strategies to take your business to the next level, Your Next Five Moves has the answers. You will gain: CLARITY on what you want and who you want to be. STRATEGY to help you reason in the war room and the board room. GROWTH TACTICS for good times and bad. SKILLS for building the right team based on strong values. INSIGHT on power plays and the art of applying leverage. Combining these principles and revelations drawn from Patrick’s own rise to successful CEO, Your Next Five Moves is a must-read for any serious executive, strategist, or entrepreneur.

The Third Door: The Wild Quest to Uncover How the World's Most Successful People Launched Their Careers


Alex Banayan - 2018
    After remarkable one-on-one interviews with Bill Gates, Maya Angelou, Steve Wozniak, Jane Goodall, Larry King, Jessica Alba, Pitbull, Tim Ferriss, Quincy Jones, and many more, Alex discovered the one key they have in common: they all took the Third Door.Life, business, success... it's just like a nightclub. There are always three ways in. There's the First Door: the main entrance, where ninety-nine percent of people wait in line, hoping to get in. The Second Door: the VIP entrance, where the billionaires and celebrities slip through. But what no one tells you is that there is always, always... the Third Door. It's the entrance where you have to jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, climb over the dumpster, crack open the window, sneak through the kitchen--there's always a way in. Whether it's how Bill Gates sold his first piece of software or how Steven Spielberg became the youngest studio director in Hollywood history, they all took the Third Door.

Screw It, Let's Do It: Lessons In Life


Richard Branson - 2006
    In Screw It, Let's Do It, I will share with you my ideas and the secrets of my success, but not simply because I hope they'll help you achieve your individual goals. Today we are increasingly aware of the effects of our actions on the environment, and I strongly believe that we each have a responsibility, as individuals and organisations, to do no harm. I will draw on Gaia Capitalism to explain why we need to take stock of how we may be damaging the environment, and why it is up to big companies like Virgin to lead the way in a more holistic approach to business. In Screw It, Let's Do It I'll be looking forwards to the future. A lot has changed since I founded Virgin in 1968, and I'll explain how I intend to take my business and my ideas to the next level and the new and exciting areas - such as launching Virgin Fuels - into which Virgin is currently moving. But I have also brought together all the important lessons, good advice and inspirational adages that have helped me along the road to success. Ironically, I have never been one to do things by the book, but I have been inspired and influenced by many remarkable people. I hope that you too might find a little inspiration between these pages.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets


Nassim Nicholas Taleb - 2001
    The other books in the series are The Black Swan, Antifragile,and The Bed of Procrustes.

Turning Numbers into Knowledge: Mastering the Art of Problem Solving


Jonathan G. Koomey - 2003
    In addition to containing numerous updates to the contents—references, URLs, and reading lists—this second edition includes a new foreword, revised chapters, and an epilogue. Mastering the art of problem solving takes more than proficiency with basic calculations; it requires understanding how people use information, recognizing the importance of ideology, learning the art of storytelling, and acknowledging the important distinction between facts and values. Intended for executives, professors, and students, this guide addresses these and other essential skills.

From Good to Great


Scott Brouwer - 2013
    Most believe that success is a long, up-hill battle that leaves little time for rest or relaxation. Well, I'm here to tell you the opposite. In fact, the difference between good and great often amounts to the simplest of strategies that, when adopted, will instantly improve your business as well as allow for long-term success. If you're ready to take your business from good to great, read on. You'll find all of the tips and tricks you need to grow your business in any economy. Together we'll cover specific marketing, sales, customer service, and business-building techniques that you can use to significantly increase your success with very little extra effort. As a result, you'll have a better business and a better life with time to do the things that you love.

Amazon Selling Blueprint - How to Find and Launch Your First Private-Label Product on Amazon in 90 Days or Less


Scott Voelker - 2015
    I'll gladly show you the exact steps I took to choose and launch my first private-label product. I generated over $118,000 in less than 6 months and have since increased my success almost 3-fold. In this book I'll explain in simple, easy-to-understand language: - How to find product ideas right before your eyes — if you know what to look for. - My secret 10 x 10 x 1 formula that can bring you $100 a day ($36,500/yr.) in pure profit. - The 5 phases of choosing & selling a product that is successful. - My personal recommendations for locating manufacturers and vendors that are easy to work with. - How "bootstrapping" can eventually turn you into a 6-figure earner. - Sneaky little tips I've learned that will save you time and help with supplier price negotiations. - My 2 favorite ways to launch your new product with unbelievable results. - 2 vital elements that significantly impact your rankings. (It's not your title and your search terms!) - My perfected 6-step plan for maintaining a steady flow of sales indefinitely. - The 9 pitfalls you must overcome to be successful. - The real-life case study of one Amazing Seller member who turned an initial $500 investment into $1,000 profit in about 60 days. BONUS: You'll get access to a special FREE online course I've created to help you take action and launch your first private-label product on Amazon. Ready to create your first profitable private-label product to sell on Amazon? Download this Kindle book now and let's get started!

Go for No! Yes is the Destination, No is How You Get There


Richard Fenton - 2007
    Go for No! chronicles four days in the life of fictional character Eric Bratton, a call reluctant copier salesman who wakes up one morning to find himself in a strange house with no idea of how he got there. But this house doesn t belong to just anyone! It belongs to him... a wildly successful, ten years in the future version of the person he could become if he learns to overcome his self-limiting beliefs and overcome his fear of failure. Through the dialogue of the two main characters the authors have fashioned an entertaining story to present the key concepts essential to sales success. Readers learn... ...What it takes to outperform 92% of the world s salespeople...That failing and failure are two very different things ...Why it s important to celebrate success and failure ...How to get past failures quickly and move on ...That the most empowering word in the world is not yes... it s NO!Written to be intentionally short and to the point, Go for No! is a quick, fun read with valuable lessons that can change the way you think, sell, and live!

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure


Tim Harford - 2011
    People can use economics and they can use statistics and numbers to get at the truth and there is a real appetite for doing so. This is such a BBC thing to say--there’s almost a public service mission to be fulfilled in educating people about economics. When I wrote The Undercover Economist, it was all about my pure enthusiasm for the subject; the book is full of stuff I wanted to say and that is always the thing with the books: they are always such fun to write. Do you think that people these days are generally more economically literate? People are now aware of economics for various reasons. There are the problems with the economy--there is always more interest in economics when it is all going wrong. Where is the border line in your new book between economics and sociology? I don’t draw a border line, and particularly not with the new book. The Undercover Economist was basically all the cool economics I could think of and The Logic of Life was me investigating a particular part of economics. All of the references in The Logic of Life were academic economics papers that I had related--and hopefully made more fun. This new book, Adapt, is very different. I have started by asking what is wrong with the world, what needs fixing, how does it work--and if economics can tell us something about that (which it can) then I have used it. And if economics is not the tool that you need--if you need to turn to sociology or engineering or biology or psychology--I have, in fact, turned to all of them in this book. If that’s what you need, then that’s where I have gone. So I have written this book in a different way: I started with a problem and tried to figure out how to solve it. What specific subjects do you tackle? To be a bit more specific, the book is about how difficult problems get solved and I look at quick change; the banking crisis; poverty; innovation, as I think there is an innovation slow-down; and the war in Iraq. Also, I look at both problems in business and in everyday life. Those are the big problems that I look at--and my conclusion is that these sorts of problems only ever get solved by trial and error, so when they are being solved, they are being solved through experimentation, which is often a bottom-up process. When they are not being solved it is because we are not willing to experiment, or to use trial and error. Do you think companies will change to be much more experimental, with more decisions placed in the hands of employees? I don’t think that is necessarily a trend, and the reason is that the market itself is highly experimental, so if your company isn’t experimental it may just happen to have a really great, successful idea--and that’s fine; if it doesn’t, it will go bankrupt. But that said, it is very interesting to look at the range of companies who have got very into experimentation--they range from the key-cutting chain Timpson’s to Google; you can’t get more different than those two firms, but actually the language is very similar; the recruitment policies are similar; the way the employees get paid is similar. The “strap line” of the book is that “Success always starts with failure.” You are a successful author… so what was the failure that set you up for success? I was working on a book before The Undercover Economist… it was going to be a sort of Adrian Mole/Bridget Jones’ Diary-styled fictional comedy, in which the hero was this economist and through the hilarious things that happened to him, all these economic principles would be explained--which is a great idea--but the trouble is that I am not actually funny. Another example would be my first job as a management consultant… and I was a terrible management consultant. I crashed out after a few months. Much better that, than to stick with the job for two or three years-- a lot of people say you have got to do that to “show your commitment.” Taking the job was a mistake--why would I need to show my commitment to a mistake? Better to realise you made a mistake, stop and do something else, which I did. That idea that “failure breeds success” is central to most entrepreneurs. Do you think we need more of it in the UK? I think that the real problem is not failure rates in business; the problem is failure rates in politics. We need a much higher failure rate in politics. What actually happens is politicians--and this is true of all political parties--have got some project and they’ll say, “Right, we are going to do this thing,” and it is quite likely that idea is a bad idea--because most ideas fail; the world is complicated and while I don’t have the numbers for this, most ideas are, as it turns out, not good ideas. But they never collect the data, or whatever it is they need to measure, to find out where their idea is failing. So they have this bad idea, roll this bad idea out and the bad idea sticks, costs the country hundreds, millions, or billions of pounds, and then the bad idea is finally reversed by the next party on purely ideological grounds and you never find out whether it really worked or not. So we have this very, very low willingness to collect the data that would be necessary to demonstrate failure, which is the bit we actually need. To give a brief example: Ken Livingstone, as Mayor of London, came along and introduced these long, bendy buses. Boris Johnson came along and said, “If you elect me, I am going to get rid of those big bendy buses and replace them with double-decker buses.” He was elected and he did it, so… which one of them is right? I don’t know. I mean, isn’t that crazy? I know democracy is a wonderful thing and we voted for Ken Livingstone and we voted for Boris Johnson, but it would be nice to actually have the data on passenger injury rates, how quickly people can get on and off these buses, whether disabled people are using these buses… the sort of basic evidence you would want to collect. Based on that, are you a supporter of David Cameron’s “Big Society”, which in a sense favours local experimentation over central government planning? Well, I have some sympathy for the idea of local experimentation, but what worries me is that we have to have some mechanism that is going to tell you what is working and what is not--and there is no proposal for that. Cameron’s Tories seem to have the view that ‘if it is local then it will work.’ In my book, I have all kinds of interesting case studies of situations where localism really would have worked incredibly well, as in, say, the US Army in Iraq. But I have also got examples of where localism did not work well at all--such as a corruption-fighting drive in Indonesia. Is the new book, Adapt, your movement away from economic rationalist to management guru? Are you going to cast your eye over bigger problems? The two changes in Adapt are that I have tried to start with the problem, rather than saying, “I have got a hammer--I’m going to look for a nail.” I started with a nail and said, “Ok, look, I need to get this hammered in.” So I have started with the problem and then looked anywhere for solutions. And the second thing is that I have tried to do is write with more of a narrative. This is not a Malcolm Gladwell book, but I really admire the way that people like Gladwell get quite complex ideas across because they get you interested in the story; that is something that I have tried to do more of here. I am not too worried about it, because I know that I am never going to turn into Malcolm Gladwell--I am always going to be Tim Harford--but it doesn’t hurt to nudge in a certain direction. On Amazon, we recommend new book ideas to people: “If you like Tim Harford you may like…”, but what does Tim Harford also like? I read a lot of books, mostly non-fiction and in two categories: people who I think write a lot better than I do, and people who think about economics more deeply than I do. In the first category I am reading people like Michael Lewis, Kathryn Schulz (I loved her first book, Being Wrong), Malcolm Gladwell and Alain de Botton. In the second category, I read lots of technical economics books, but I enjoy Steven Landsburg, Edward Glaeser (who has a book out now which looks good), Bill Easterly… I don’t necessarily agree with all of these people! When I am not reading non-fiction, I am reading comic books or 1980s fantasy authors like Jack Vance.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion


John Hagel III - 2010
    Individuals and companies can no longer rely on the stocks of knowledge that they've carefully built up and stored away. Information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into the stream. But many of us remain stuck in old practices--practices that could undermine us as we search for success and meaning. In this revolutionary book, three doyens of the Internet age, whose path-breaking work has made headlines around the world, reveal the adjustments we must make if we take these changes seriously. In a world of increasing risk and opportunity, we must understand the importance of pull. Understood and used properly, the power of pull can draw out the best in people and institutions by connecting them in ways that increase understanding and effectiveness. Pull can turn uncertainty into opportunity, and enable small moves to achieve outsized impact. Drawing on pioneering research, The Power of Pull shows how to apply its principles to unlock the hidden potential of individuals and organizations, and how to use it as a force for social change and the development of creative talent. The authors explore how to use the power of pull to:Access new sources of informationAttract likeminded individuals from around the worldShape serendipity to increase the likelihood of positive chance encountersForm creation spaces to drive you and your colleagues to new heightsTransform your organization to adapt to the flow of knowledgeThe Power of Pull is essential reading for entrepreneurs, managers, and anybody interested in understanding and harnessing the shifting forces of our networked world.

Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal


Oren Klaff - 2011
    Over the past 13 years, he has used his one-of-a- kind method to raise more than $400 million--and now, for the first time, he describes his formula to help you deliver a winning pitch in any business situation.Whether you're selling ideas to investors, pitching a client for new business, or even negotiating for a higher salary, "Pitch Anything "will transform the way you position your ideas.According to Klaff, creating and presenting a great pitch isn't an art--it's a simple science. Applying the latest findings in the field of neuroeconomics, while sharing eye-opening stories of his method in action, Klaff describes how the brain makes decisions and responds to pitches. With this information, you'll remain in complete control of every stage of the pitch process."Pitch Anything" introduces the exclusive STRONG method of pitching, which can be put to use immediately: Setting the Frame Telling the Story Revealing the Intrigue Offering the Prize Nailing the Hookpoint Getting a DecisionOne truly great pitch can improve your career, make you a lot of money--and even change your life. Success is dependent on the method you use, not how hard you try. "Better method, more money," Klaff says. "Much better method, much more money." Klaff is the best in the business because his method is much better than anyone else's. And now it's yours.Apply the tactics and strategies outlined in "Pitch Anything" to engage and persuade your audience--and you'll have more funding and support than you ever thought possible.

Holly Smith's Money Saving Book: Simple savings hacks for a happy life


Holly Smith - 2020
    She founded the Facebook group Extreme Couponing and Bargains UK (the second largest Facebook group in the world) and is on TikTok, Youtube and Instagram helping as many people as possible to save money too.This book contains all her best hacks and tips to save money and make money - simple, life-changing ideas for everyone.Holly has included her favourite hacks from the Extreme Couponing and Bargains UK community too, who inspired her to write this book. And has asked all her money-saving expert friends to contribute tips too.All the costly moments of everyday life are included, from supermarket shops to kids parties - even special occasions like weddings and Christmas.Discover lots of fun ways to get saving, find the bargains and make your money go further.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It


Tien Tzuo - 2018
    The real transformation--and the real opportunity--is just beginning.Subscription companies are growing nine times faster than the S&P 500. Why? Because unlike product companies, subscription companies know their customers. A happy subscriber base is the ultimate economic moat. Today's consumers prefer the advantages of access over the hassles of maintenance, from transportation (Uber, Surf Air), to clothing (Stitch Fix, Eleven James), to razor blades and makeup (Dollar Shave Club, Birchbox). Companies are similarly demanding easier, long-term solutions, trading their server rooms for cloud storage solutions like Box. Simply put, the world is shifting from products to services.But how do you turn customers into subscribers? As the CEO of the world's largest subscription management platform, Tien Tzuo has helped hundreds of companies transition from relying on individual sales to building customer-centric, recurring-revenue businesses. His core message in Subscribed is simple: Ready or not, excited or terrified, you need to adapt to the Subscription Economy -- or risk being left behind.Tzuo shows how to use subscriptions to build lucrative, ongoing one-on-one relationships with your customers. This may require reinventing substantial parts of your company, from your accounting practices to your entire IT architecture, but the payoff can be enormous. Just look at the case studies:  *   Adobe transitions from selling enterprise software licenses to offering cloud-based solutions for a flat monthly fee, and quadruples its valuation.  *   Fender evolves from selling guitars one at a time to creating lifelong musicians by teaching beginners to play, and keeping them inspired for life.  *   Caterpillar uses subscriptions to help solve problems -- it's not about how many tractors you can rent, but how much dirt you need to move. In Subscribed, you'll learn how these companies made the shift, and how you can transform your own product into a valuable service with a practical, step-by-step framework. Find out how how you can prepare and prosper now, rather than trying to catch up later.

The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million


Mark Roberge - 2015
    Everyone wants to build the next $100 million business and author Mark Roberge has actually done it using a unique methodology that he shares with his readers. As an MIT alum with an engineering background, Roberge challenged the conventional methods of scaling sales utilizing the metrics-driven, process-oriented lens through which he was trained to see the world. In this book, he reveals his formulas for success. Readers will learn how to apply data, technology, and inbound selling to every aspect of accelerating sales, including hiring, training, managing, and generating demand. As SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services for software company HubSpot, Mark led hundreds of his employees to the acquisition and retention of the company's first 10,000 customers across more than 60 countries. This book outlines his approach and provides an action plan for others to replicate his success, including the following key elements: Hire the same successful salesperson every time — The Sales Hiring Formula Train every salesperson in the same manner — The Sales Training Formula Hold salespeople accountable to the same sales process — The Sales Management Formula Provide salespeople with the same quality and quantity of leads every month — The Demand Generation Formula Leverage technology to enable better buying for customers and faster selling for salespeople Business owners, sales executives, and investors are all looking to turn their brilliant ideas into the next $100 million revenue business. Often, the biggest challenge they face is the task of scaling sales. They crave a blueprint for success, but fail to find it because sales has traditionally been referred to as an art form, rather than a science. You can't major in sales in college. Many people question whether sales can even be taught. Executives and entrepreneurs are often left feeling helpless and hopeless. The Sales Acceleration Formula completely alters this paradigm. In today's digital world, in which every action is logged and masses of data sit at our fingertips, building a sales team no longer needs to be an art form. There is a process. Sales can be predictable. A formula does exist.