Book Review: A Practical Guide to Selling
Posted on June 19th, 2009 by Adam Myers – 1 CommentPart of the weekly life here at Global-Roam is book reviews. Each employee is given a constant supply of books to read and every few months we review what we have been reading. These books cover any number of topics such as psychology, selling, programming skills, selling, project management, data analysis, business theory, and self-organisation.
Over the years a key part of our book reviews is the “binary review” – a 0 or 1 for if the book was good or bad (we are a bunch of nerds after all). We’re also keen to learn practical ways in which we can directly improve the processes in our business.
On this blog we’re going to post a few of these reviews to give you some insight into how we work. We also have a secret, sinister motive of helping us to think about what we will say before our meeting…
| Book: | A Practical Guide to Selling |
| Author: | Grant Hyman |
| “Binary” Review: | Zero |
Over the last month (ok, the last 2 days), I’ve been reading A Practical Guide to Selling by Grant Hyman (sorry, no Amazon link but there is this at women’s network). Grant is a well accomplished, Australian marketing guru who learnt his skill the hard way at the “University of the Pavement” and wrote this book to supplement formal education with “a practical and realistic alternative.” (pg 7)
Unfortunately, Grant doesn’t do a good job. The book suffers from two significant barriers to getting a coveted “1” in the binary review stakes.
- The book simply didn’t tell me anything new. I’d already learnt everything he had to say from other books like How I raised myself from Failure to Success in selling and How to make Friends and Influence people.
- Even if the book did have compelling content, you’d be hard pressed to find it because Grant simply doesn’t know how to organise his thoughts. This is first revealed when reading the table of contents, the chapters (of which there are 79 chapters, ranging from Auctions to Health to Self-Esteem to Upselling) are arranged entirely in alphabetical order, rather than being packaged into sensible blocks. This leaves the reader lost, bouncing around between chapters trying to find the information they want rather than tidbits of wisdom gained over Grant’s hard life.
Grant simply can’t decide what he wants this book to be. Is it a book on selling, buying, ethics, depression, or on how to live a happy healthy life? The topics and tone change so quickly between chapters it leaves you as confused as trying to understand the allegiances of the characters in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. The book could have used some series editing and an author that actually knew what he wanted to say.
Ah, I love the internet. It gives us geeks an opportunity to express ourselves much more frankly than if we were talking to someone face-to-face.
So, A Practical Guide to Selling gets a firm Zero, and doesn’t give me anything to say at our meeting later today. Perhaps I could use it as a case study on “How not to order your chapters…”
(For the sake of transparency, we’re signed up to the Affiliates program at Amazon, and any books you buy using our links make us a little richer)
I wrote this book as a reference manual (not as a storybook) to be used primarily by sales people in specific sales situations. The secondary market is for usage by people (buyers, marketers, managers etc) who want to understand why/how a salesperson did/would do what they do.
How would in-field (or if you like, at the coalface) salespeople access how-to information in a reference manual if not by alphabetical listing of focused chapters, backed up by an alphabetical index?