The New Rules of Sales And Service – David Meerman Scott [Book Review]
The New Rules of Sales and Service is David Meerman Scott’s 10th (!!) book and an important extension of his best seller The New Rules of Marketing and PR.
Adam and I have been big fans of David Meerman Scott’s work since The New Rules of Marketing and PR gave us the marketing language we desperately needed in 2007 and ultimately led to our collaboration on the Web Strategy Planning Template.
The New Rules of Sales and Service is going to help define the language we need to discuss the changes that we are seeing all around us in the world of sales and customer service.
My key take homes:
David’s 9 other books have really focussed on marketing – its principles and the changes the internet has caused. This book extends those changes deeply into sales and service which is a crucial piece of the modern business puzzle. My key take homes:
- There cannot be a distinction between sales and service and marketing. The 2 have to work together.
- The buyer has control.
- Be open.
- Content is driving buying behaviours.
- Personalise your service using the context of the buyer.
- Tell stories
A Slideshare presentation from The New Rules of Sales and Service:
A bit more detail:
Even looking at the table of contents got me thinking immediately.
Which of the following sections was most immediately relevant to me? (which sounds suspiciously like a question a buyer might ask…)
- The old world of sales and service
- The new rules of sales and service
- Your story
- Integrating marketing and sales with buyer personas
- The sales cycle is now the buying cycle
- Agile, real-time social sales
- The new service imperative
- Agile, real-time social service
- The social you
- Your social company
Each of the sections was broken into 150+ small essays. This made it even easier to see which part I was most interested in. So I dove into the buyer persona interview (p84).
We’ve been helping clients develop buyer personas for at least 5 years so I was really interested to read David’s insights. Immediately I found value in his suggestions: visit your buyer personas in their offices and at their conferences. Watch the webinars they watch, read the books they read. Very simple ideas to get inside the head of your buyer personas and they definitely helped me with a particularly sticky buyer persona situation I’ve been struggling with.
Just that one short section made the book really valuable to me.
So then I went back to the beginning and started to read. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Typical of David’s books, there are a ton of stories throughout that drive home the lessons of The New Rules of Sales and Service. From helping to understand the old world and the changes that have given birth to the new, David urges us to put the buyer in control of the process and to inform, educate, entertain and delight them with the incredible tools and technology at our disposal. From stories of big business to small, from web-based to bricks and mortar, David has crafted an incredibly useful book for entrepreneurs and marketing and sales managers alike.
