A useful, engagingly written, and uplifting method for improving sales performance.
A guide offers advice on cracking the code for becoming an exceptional tech salesperson.
Early on in his book, Prangley confesses that it pains him to see tech sales reps trying to improve their game and feeling lost. Drawing on his own long, personal experience, he hopes to present these forlorn colleagues with sales methods that he’s developed over the years, techniques that he’s absolutely confident will help them exceed their quotas. He first addresses what he refers to as persistent myths: that sales are all about the money, that sales are about tricking people, that superb sales figures are mostly a matter of luck. He then proceeds to lay out the basics of his method, foremost of which is “Finding Your Why”—really focusing on the essential reasons why readers are in sales in the first place. (His precepts are specifically tailored to business to business, but he insists they can be more widely applied.) Each of his chapters addresses a core idea of sales, from researching prospective customers to strengthening the teamwork instinct. Each one ends with a series of useful “action steps” that readers can implement. For example: “Actively work at building a great relationship with your manager. In particular, commit to making sure your manager never needs to chase you for accurate and timely data.” At all points in his book, Prangley very convincingly adopts the tone of a friendly older mentor, and he manages to do this without any condescension. His concentration on the personal element of sales is familiar to this type of manual but nevertheless is refreshingly human. And he organizes his material expertly; the guide is generously supplied with lists, acronyms, and bullet points to streamline the reading experience. No matter what stage of their careers, readers involved in sales will likely find plenty of value in these pages.
A useful, engagingly written, and uplifting method for improving sales performance.Pub Date: March 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5445-2745-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2022
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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