Tuesday, June 28, 2011

How To Become A Rainmaker: The Rules For Getting And Keeping Customers And Clients By Jeffrey J. Fox

How to Become a Rainmaker: The Rules for Getting and Keeping Customers and Clients

How to Become a Rainmaker: The Rules for Getting and Keeping Customers and Clients
By Jeffrey J. Fox

List Price: $16.99
Price: $10.11 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com

448 new or used available from $0.01

Average customer review:
(80 customer reviews)

Product Description

Filled with smart tips given in the Fox signature style, counter- intuitive, controversial, and practiced, this hard-hitting collection of sales advice shows readers how to woo, pursue, and finally win any customer. In witty, succinct chapters, Fox offers surprising, daring, and totally practical wisdom that will help readers rise above the competition in any company in any field. A terrific resource for CEOs, as well as anyone looking to distinguish themselves in salesbe it books, cars, or real estateHow to Become a Rainmaker offers the opportunity to rise above the competition in any company, in any field.

Product Details
  • Amazon Sales Rank: #36995 in Books
  • Published on: 2000-05-17
  • Released on: 2000-05-17
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 192 pages

Features

  • ISBN13: 9780786865956
  • Condition: New
  • Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
    Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
This is an afternoon read, pure and simple. And chances are good that once readers accept Fox's hard-hitting yet commonsense approaches, they'll accept his sales process, which applies, by the way, to selling widgets, promoting intangible services, or selling yourself. Every one of the author's 50 two-page to four-page chapters contains just one nugget of information more than the preceding section, enough to keep the momentum and the attention. A sad story about the hazards of drinking coffee (it spilled--and the prospect was then distracted by a second crisis) is followed by a notice not to eat a major meal during a sales lunch, which is promptly followed by "no pen in the shirt pocket" advice. Fox's seemingly disparate hints and tips, in short, comprise a very logical and memorable way of rainmaking, and a short tome that will show anyone the how-tos. Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"the best book on selling I've seen. Period." -- Gerald Sindell, President, Publishing Consulting Services

About the Author
Jeffrey Fox founded Fox & Company, Inc., a marketing consulting firm, in 1982. Client engagements include marketing strategy, innovation enhancement, selling skills training, branding, and various applications of a proprietary methodology called "dollarization." Prior to starting Fox & Co. Jeffrey was Vice-President, Marketing and a Corporate Vice President of Loctite Corporation. He was also Director of Marketing for the wine division of The Pillsbury Co., and held various senior level marketing jobs at Heublein, Inc., including Director of New Products. Jeffrey is the winner of "Sales & Marketing Management" magazine's Outstanding Marketer Award; winner of the American Marketing Association's Outstanding Marketer in Connecticut; and the National Industrial Distributors award as the Nation's Best Industrial Marketer. He is the subject of a Harvard Business School case study that is rated one of the top 100 case studies and is thought to be the most widely taught marketing case in the world. Jeffrey graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and earned his MBA from Harvard Business School. He served as Trustee of Trinity College, and has won several alumni awards including Person of the Year. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Saint Francis Hospital, one of the nation's top 100 hospitals. Jeff is the author of How to Become CEO, which was on the NY Times, Business Week, Wall Street Journal, Knight-Ridder, Amazon.com, and German best seller lists. The book is published in twenty-five languages and in all the major countries of Western Europe, Asia, and South America. Jeff's second book, How To Become A Rainmaker was also a BusinessWeek and Wall Street Journal best seller, and is being published worldwide. His third book Don't Send A Resume, published in May of 2001, is a contrarian approach to marketing oneself.

Customer Reviews

Most helpful customer reviews

79 of 87 people found the following review helpful.
3A Fairly Good Book on Selling, Not About Rainmaking At All
By Professor Donald Mitchell
I would give this book 4 stars except the title is so misleading. Perhaps I am jaundiced on this point, knowing many of the top rainmakers in the world in investment banking, advertising, law, and consulting as I do. NONE of them would have become rainmakers if they had followed the advice of this book. They might have become fairly effective salespeople instead.

Rainmakers find ways to connect with people well beyond anything considered in this book. In fact, since no research is cited by the author, I wonder if any research was done to write this book. It has the feeling of being a memoir of what the author has found works for him.

The only part of the advice that I thought was wrong was the insistence on using canned questions to move the prospect along. Sophisticated customers spot these a mile away, and run in the opposite direction. You will simply be manipulating people, and that's NOT the way to be a rainmaker.

Having had my expectations falsely raised by the title, I still yearn for a good book on being a top rainmaker based on the best practices of what they actually do. Perhaps someone else will write that book.

If you want a short book on selling that covers many of selling's important principles, this is a perfectly okay book. If you have been selling for more than 5 years, there's probably not much here to help you unless you totally lack emotional intelligence (in that case, read Daniel Goleman's excellent book, Emotional Intelligence).

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
3A Decent Basic Refresher Course on Sales
By RV
As a lawyer and as an MBA that is currently running his own consulting business, I picked up this book as a way of giving myself a refresher course on sales. I was not disappointed by the book, nor was I amazed by the advice given. The book is easy to read and contains 160 odd pages of large font, widely spaced text. I read this entire book during the course of a brief flight from Los Angeles to San Jose(about an hour).

Others have commented that the book contains a lot of simple, obvious and straight forward advice and I tend to agree with this assessment. However, advice does not always need to be complex or particularly insightful in order to be useful. For example, it is always good to remember the value of embracing your client's objections and to develop a client-centric view of the sales process. While this is obvious to most sales people, many of us tend to overlook this principle from time to time.

The book has other fundamental weaknesses. For one thing, most of the examples contained in the book are non-specific and often feel like made up clichés. For example, the truly predictable tale of the sales person who was able to land a huge account by being nice to a secretary that later became an executive VP...

From my perspective the book also has another serious deficiency - most of the examples given in the book deal with tangible products. The author almost completely ignores the often much more challenging and complex process of selling services.

The bottom line is this: this is a decent book if you need a quick refresher or if you are completely unfamiliar with the world of sales. If that is not the case, look for a different book.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
5Great book on the principles of sales
By Dan E. Ross
I bought the book two days ago and I read it really quickly (2-3 hours). Like other books on improving sales you need to APPLY these techniques and principles in order to get maximum value out of the book. If anything, you will at least learn to recognize good sales people from bad ones.

This book is, for some, common sense. For others, this book is a quick refresher course of the basic principals of selling and finally, it might be a completely new experience for many and it may have you thinking about the art of selling. The reality is that the value of this book, to you, probably depends on how much training and common sense you already have. In general, I really enjoyed the book and thought there were many interesting sales concepts, which I am looking forward to employing to see how effective they are in real life. Fox continually emphasized the concept of dollarization throughout the book and gave examples of different sales techniques throughout the book.

http://astore.amazon.com/amazon-book-books-20/detail/0786865954

 

No comments: