Geoff’s new book… Why isn’t it about inside sales?
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Sep 27, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
I've just gotten a book published, but it's not about telesales. Here's the story.
My blog posts focus on inside sales tips for business development reps, telesales reps, and management, but there’s always been an undercurrent of education in them. At heart, I’ve always been an “education geek,” because when it comes to applying great techniques, I’ve always felt that the genie-in-the-bottle has been in getting reps to want to use them, or they may never be applied. As I learned years ago when I taught Special Ed (way before I started selling high technology), if you can put learners in a mindspace where they’ll want to learn, they’ll start inventing creative ways to educate themselves, a technique used by just about every great inside sales manager with whom I’ve worked.
It’s been said that people generally remember 10% of what they read, but retain 50% of what they see and hear. That’s why, when I was teaching school, we used classroom educational films as a tool to encourage learning. We used 16mm movie projectors, because DVDs hadn’t been invented yet. And a few years ago, with the advent of new media, school libraries started throwing those films away. In many cases, the content, which was often exceptional, was never transferred to newer media, which meant an important part of the history of education in North America, was being lost. No one seemingly cared, and no wonder why. A book discussing the history and importance of the academic films, which comprise the sciences and humanities, and were the most intellectually stimulating of the genre, had never been written. These 100,000 or so films were being lost, and nothing was being done. So I wrote the book.
As sales reps, we actually have a history of our profession. To a large extent, it started with John Henry Patterson at National Cash Register. Education has a history too, detailing different methods and practices of getting people to learn effectively. Today there are loads of books written on inside sales practices. It’s an almost overwhelming series of choices, and just about all of them have something of value. To date, I haven’t written one, primarily because many of the techniques I teach I want to save for my classes, and, to a certain extent, as good as I feel it would be, it would essentially just be adding to the stack of extant literature on the subject. The blog that you’re reading today, in essence, constitutes a book of terrific inside sales techniques. It’s online, and you can use it today, free.
So that’s a bit of the story behind my new book Academic Films for the Classroom: A History. The link clicks to Amazon, if you’d like to know more. Some of my customers have already figured out that the Geoff Alexander of inside sales training is the same guy who’s written about educational film, and this post explains how & why it happened.
OK, next week, it’s back to another important, effective inside sales tip. But for today, consider this: many of you have a passion for something that you feel is important, aside from what you do for a living. If you do, and have something you think will add to a greater understanding of it for others, consider starting writing your own book when you go home tonight. And add a passion for knowledge to your Best Practices Playbook.