[.ca] How to Become a Rainmaker (ISBN 0786865954)

A Decent Basic Refresher Course on Sales:
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.

Simple minded and trite:
I am sure that this book is handed out at many a company meeting. Too bad it does not have any substance to it. This book is merely a collection of stale and cliche ridden sales tips (though they have been changed enough to prevent any copyright lawsuits!). If you are looking for real sales tips, dont' buy this book. Rather, go to Google and search for sales tips. If you are a manager looking for a way to make your boss think you are motivating the troops, order this book. It might help your next review. This book is basically this year's "Who Moved my Cheese" or the fish throwing book.

just what I needed:
I'm new to sales, so this book was great for me. I got a lot of help from it. I needed to sell my car among few other things, so i decided to go for this book because it didn't look like some sales bible filled with tons of information. I needed some fast information I could use right away, and this is exactly what I got from this book. I'm guessing that to the seasoned, experienced seller this book would be waste of money and time, but for beginner who needs some fast, to the point information, it will be very helpful. this is what you find in this book, ** customers don't care about you, but about themselves and their problems. ** Always plan your sales call, like a sports team plans their strategy. (He tells you how) ** Help them see money. Don't sell the product, sell dollorized value. People would select the product that yield lowest total cost. (I can't explain this, it'll take too much space, read the book, but this is one of the gems from the book.) ** He tells you few "killer" sales questions and explains them, very helpful. ** Don't make cold calls, don't go for "break the ice" introduction (he explains why)

get you into trouble water:
Grabbed the old stuffs and merged them into a book. It was just a salad dish, not a melting pot. The segregation fully reflected Mr. Fox's inadequacies in sales. Anyway, broken pieces were broken pieces. Good needle-works could hardly conceal. Using the words "Killer sales question" also disclosed Mr. Fox's real attitude towards customers. A sincere salesperson will not kill her/his customers with any probing question. Sales pro does mind the wordings and will choose them carefully. Just another bogus guru.

Weak and cliche:
If you need this book to tell you "Don't talk with food in Your mouth" then you should have a chat with your mom on why she didn't teach you table manners. If you find anything in this book to be new or useful then you are a very bad sales person Stick to the classics from Miller Heiman like Strategic selling.