An appealingly fresh and energetic look at rethinking the sales meeting.
Prangley provides a blueprint for improving all aspects of the standard sales meeting in this business guide.
This book focuses on the surprising shortcomings of the traditional efforts most professionals put into their sales meetings (“Tone, timing, clarity, active listening, rapport, preparation, inflection, and eye contact—all the keys to communication—have fallen by the wayside”); for the author, a former professional actor, the key word is “performance.” When Prangley witnessed typical sales pitches in his new career in tech sales, he began compiling a very acting-oriented list of problems: too much anxiety, too much tension, too many swallowed or mumbled words, too little eye contact or control of body movements. Everywhere he looked, he saw boring meetings, and he considered this a crucial flaw; the author asserts that, once a sales professional has squared away the basics of the trade, the biggest factor in success is the ability to run a sales meeting well. In these pages, Prangley seeks to demonstrate to readers how they can use some of the same techniques that enhance acting performances to improve their meeting performances—everything from maintaining correct posture to vocal delivery to wardrobe. The author contends that pairing these skills with industry-specific traditional practices, like market research and customer profiling, will take sales meetings to a new level. Prangley is such a winning personality on the page that even readers who might be impatient with tired cliches like “Trust your gut” will be won over by his optimistic encouragement. He stresses that achieving mastery over running sales meetings is more about hard work and perseverance than talent or luck, which will come as a relief to any of his readers who lack movie star charisma. This combination of an actor’s-eye-view and a seasoned professional’s advice is irresistible; professionals at any level will find invaluable pointers here.
An appealingly fresh and energetic look at rethinking the sales meeting.Pub Date: May 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781544538303
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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