A richly personal view of improving the interactions at the heart of sales.
Cowan outlines principles of salesmanship distilled from a lifetime in the business.
Drawing on his more than six decades of selling and sales management experience, the author shares his vision of the best principles and practices of sales (concentrating on one-on-one interactions rather than group sales, telephone sales, or the internet) and proposes ways that salespeople can adapt their psyches to improve their sales. As Cowan notes at the outset of his nonfiction debut, the general public tends to view sales and salespeople in a less than favorable light, evidenced by the fact that very few institutions offer university-level training in salesmanship. “We all recognize that to travel the same road we have traveled for a long time is quite comfortable,” he writes, invoking Robert Frost’s famous poem. “To choose a road less traveled takes courage and faith to meet new and exciting challenges.” Central to much of the author’s advice about selling is an emphasis on good interviewing, which often boils down to the art of listening. “Too often,” he observes, “the salesperson who loves to talk can’t wait for the prospect to stop talking so he can talk more.” Cowan includes not only diverting cartoons and sketches of some of the people he references but also affectionate stories about individuals who’ve shaped his own journey in sales. This is in line with the warmly personal tone he adopts throughout the book; there’s an enormous amount of wisdom conveyed, but it’s all delivered in such an invitingly personal way that the reader will feel encouraged rather than lectured to. (The author’s stress on listening as the true basis of trust is refreshing in a professional world that loves to hear itself talk.) Cowan’s focus on individual psychology is equally thought provoking as he posits that, in order to be truly good at what they do, salespeople should understand themselves before they try to understand their potential customers.
A richly personal view of improving the interactions at the heart of sales.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9798218260613
Page Count: 128
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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