Recommended Resource – Act Like a Sales Pro

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Act Like a Sales Pro: How to Command the Business Stage and Dramatically Increase Your Sales with Proven Acting Techniques

written by Julie Hansen
and published by Career Press

About the Reference

Act Like a Sales Pro by Julie Hansen reveals the behaviors exhibited by effective salespersons that create a memorable buying experience. Julie teaches readers the art of selling through easy-to-follow exercises then enable them to more effectively prepare and execute on all types of sales engagements. By reading her book, one learns how to:

  • Gain an appointment using audition techniques
  • Draw interest from reluctant prospects using secrets of the performer
  • Deliver memorable presentations
  • React to the unexpected and control the sale using the rules of improvisation

Benefits of Using This Reference

StrategyDriven Contributors like Act Like a Sales Pro for its fresh approach to effective selling. Julie’s book engages the reader and translates for them the insights she’s gained from the acting world into that of the sales call. And her step-by-step exercises make these ‘acting behaviors’ immediately implementable by even those who don’t consider themselves to be good salespersons.

What makes Act Like a Sales Pro truly different from other books on selling is its focus on personal behaviors. Other quality books focus on the process of selling whereas Julie’s book teaches readers the physical and verbal behaviors they should exhibit while executing the selling process. We put some of Julie’s recommendations to the test and found they did help secure a positive outcome.

Act Like a Sales Pro effectively fills what is often a void in other sales books and training programs. Filled with immediately implementable recommendations and real world examples, Act Like a Sales Pro is a StrategyDriven recommended read.

Additional Resources

Complimenting Act Like a Sales Pro, StrategyDriven provides an abundance of information on the consultative selling process within the StrategyDriven Consultative Selling Knowledge Center.

Recommended Resource – Positive Intelligence

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Positive Intelligence: Why Only 20% of Teams and Individuals Achieve Their True Potential and How You Can Achieve Yours

by Shirzad Chamine

About the Reference

Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine reveals the ten personality Saboteurs limiting individual performance and the three Sage strategies to combat these limiters. Through his book, Shirzad provides a step-by-step method for unleashing potential by:

  • Identifying and conquering your top Saboteurs
  • Determining your initial Positive Intelligence (PQ) score
  • Developing new brain ‘muscles’ and significantly increasing your PQ score
  • Applying PQ tools and techniques to increase your personal performance and fulfillment

Benefits of Using This Reference

StrategyDriven Contributors like Positive Intelligence for its well-structured approach to identifying and overcoming one’s performance limiters. We found the book, its assessments, and recommended actions to be easy to follow and implement. Shirzad’s assessments accurately identified our Saboteur traits and the inner struggle – the thoughts, feelings, justification lies, and impact on self and others – these cause. It further revealed our personal motivation and style; leading to an understanding of the performance barriers improvement efforts should target. Positive Intelligence concluded with three Sage strategies, supported by insightful and thought provoking ‘inquiries,’ that were helpful in addressing our unique Saboteurs.

Understanding the intellectual and emotional barriers limiting one’s actions is a first critical step to improving performance. While a dry read at times, Positive Intelligence helps readers precisely identify their personality limiters and provides sound, actionable advise on how to overcome them. Shirzad’s book goes beyond the academic; providing real world examples and solutions. It’s this sound, implementable insight that makes Positive Intelligence a StrategyDriven recommended read.

The Transformative CEO

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The Transformative CEO: Impact Lessons from Industry Game Changes

by Jeffrey J. Fox and Robert Reiss

About the Reference

The Transformative CEO by Jeffrey J. Fox and Robert Reiss identifies a number of common personal qualities and approaches taken by celebrity CEOs in building or turning around their companies. Jeffrey and Robert then breakdown these items into supporting subparts and provides a series of quotes from notable CEOs in support of each subpart.

Specific topics covered by The Transformative CEO include:

  • Turning around a company
  • Building superior customer service
  • Thinking big and going global
  • Performing while transforming
  • Having a higher purpose
  • Innovating and making everything better

Why You Should Not Buy This Book

StrategyDriven Contributors found The Transformative CEO to be shallow and largely uninsightful. While the book does provide some overarching characteristics and approaches of successful chief executives, we found many of these items to be common sense truisms, philosophies most junior managers and graduate level business students would stipulate. That renown CEOs agree with these premises serves to give them credibility but does little to suggest how the reader should implement the recommended approaches.

The book suggests actions to improve the management decision-making process. Surprisingly, these actions – the most valuable and explicit points made in the book – are largely unsupported by CEO comments.

Alternative Recommendation

StrategyDriven Contributors believe there are certain qualities, characteristics, and approaches common among successful CEOs. Furthermore, we believe CEOs set the tone and tenor of the organization over which they preside and so embodying these traits is important.

We recommend The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker as a superior resource for learning about the admirable qualities of an executive. Through his book, Dr. Drucker provides readers with the specific actionable steps necessary to become more effective as leaders through improved decision-making and action.

Click here to read our review of The Effective Executive.

Executive Wisdom: Reflections For Today’s Leaders

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Executive Wisdom: Reflections For Today’s Leaders

by Reynier Lezcano

About the Reference

Executive Wisdom by Reynier Lezcano is an A to Z collection of leadership wisdom covering personal behaviors and situational approaches. These insights are presented as brief passages that are well indexed for quick situational reference.

Benefits of Using this Reference

StrategyDriven Contributors like Executive Wisdom for the simple, direct way in which sound leadership practices are communicated. This book could easily be used in daily reflection by new and seasoned business leaders and/or as a tool to mentor others.

One aspect of the book we did not appreciate was the few occasions where progressive philosophies were asserted. Not only do we fundamentally disagree with this philosophy but we found it detracted from the otherwise timeless principles presented.

As leaders, we need to constantly remind ourselves of the proper behaviors to embody; being ever vigilant against slipping into destructive behavior that more often than not represents the easier road. Executive Wisdom provides those reminders in a way that is easy to use and to refer back to as the need arises.

Recommended Resource – Secrets of Power Problem Solving

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Secrets of Power Problem Solving

by Roger Dawson

About the Reference

Secrets of Power Problem Solving by Roger Dawson provides an insightful examination of the theories and practices associated with decision-making. Throughout his book, Roger challenges commonly held beliefs about the decision-making process and provides actionable methods to effectively address problems of all types… of which he indicates there are only two, people and money issues.

In Secrets of Power Problem Solving, Roger presents methods for answering several key decision-making questions:

  • Does the Problem Deserve a Solution?
  • Is the Problem Real or Imagined?
  • How Quickly Should You Choose?
  • Intuition or Rapid Reasoning?
  • What Makes You a Great Problem Solver?

Benefits of Using this Reference

StrategyDriven Contributors like Secrets of Power Problem Solving because of its logical, well-structured approach to everyday decision-making that will be of value to new and seasoned professionals. Roger provides immediately implementable methods for effectively dealing with both people and money challenges. Furthermore, each chapter is summarized by a “Key points from this chapter” list that makes periodic review of his book for principles reinforcement easy and fast.

If we had one suggestion to offer it would be that the flow of the book and its recommendations would be more easily synthesized by the reader if an overview of the decision-making process was presented in the beginning of the book. This is a very minor point as a moderately experienced decision-maker can easily follow Roger’s line of thinking throughout the book.

Effective decision-making is both a role and challenge for today’s professionals. Secrets of Power Problem Solving’s methods provide new and seasoned professionals with a collection of decision-making practices that will help them become better decision-makers. Additionally, the recommendations Roger presents throughout his book are very well aligned with StrategyDriven’s decision-making best practices; making Secrets of Power Problem Solving a StrategyDriven recommended read.