You’d Be Barking Mad Not To Read This Book

📅 17th September 2020 | 2020/21 Sales Book Reviews

If you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing Geoff Burch in live action, then once COVID-19 has gone away, do so. He is one of the funniest business speakers I’ve had the pleasure of working with. His humour extends to his books. On my book-shelf, there’s ‘Irresistible Persuasion’ ‘Self-Made Me’ and ‘The Way of the Dog’. The latter is the subject of this weeks short review.

At first glance, one could mistaken TWOTD for a children’s story. It’s anything but. Hilarious, allegorical and clever. It will leave you in stitches:

The Good

Everything about the tale of Derek Stubbins is good. Everyone can learn from his struggle for sales success and eventual redemption. And it all happens in less than one hundred and twenty pages. To start with, Geoff Burch takes us on a self-referential journey of his publications and his wisdom, and this nicely sets up for the ‘dog section’. Throughout the story, Geoff adds extra pieces of business and life advice to the reader. My personal favourite is Notes….Number 18. It goes ‘ when you are involved with people, family, friends and customers give one hundred per cent of your attention. Be there for them’ How many of us are guilty of not listening or caring enough about those around us. Perhaps our education system needs to add humility to the syllabus?

Moreover, this book is a guide to life. It enables you to find out what you want, where you have to go to find it and how to look out for obstacles and road-humps along the way.

The Bad

Geoff highlights a couple of bad habits that many salespeople suffer from. One is diving in too soon with a solution. Trying to persuade your customer (or in this case sheep) to go faster than they are prepared to may jeopardise everything. There maybe genuine concerns about your proposed course of action. Involve your customer. Establish their issues and get agreement to proceed.

The other fatal mistake is not asking your customer to commit to your proposal/performance of machine/money-saving idea. In the preamble, Geoff highlights a pop song. It’s all about a girl called ‘Alice’. See if you can work out what Geoff means.

The Ugly

On more than one occasion, Geoff refers to some nasty competitive characters. They represent the arrogant, hard-selling brigade. You know the ones. They use rough tactics and manipulation in order to get the order! Geoff explains that in the long run, these guys don’t win and his story (you’ll be pleased to know) ends happily for the good guys. And one of the reasons, is that they congratulated their ‘customers’ on their ‘purchase’. This cements the on-going relationship they now enjoy. The more perspicacious amongst you will gather that doing business next time around will be a whole lot easier.

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Tags: sales training, work ethic