STOP RANDOM ACTS OF MARKETING

A veteran of business-to-business sales and marketing advises companies on process improvements.

In this debut business book, Hayward draws on decades of work in sales and marketing for large companies (and her current work as chief marketing officer “for hire”) to advise CEOs of midsized companies on the most productive use of their sales and marketing budgets. The book lays out methods for determining customer needs, responding accordingly, and evaluating results in order to develop a coherent and effective strategy for attracting and retaining customers rather than a disjointed series of inefficient sales and marketing initiatives. Hayward guides readers through the fundamentals of marketing strategy, with a particular emphasis on surveying customers and prospects to make decisions based on facts instead of assumptions (“Sales could never have identified this remedy because they could never have identified the core concern of customers,” Hayward writes about one surprising customer revelation). The book also devotes many pages to distinguishing between the two disciplines (“It's surprising to see how few CEOs truly understand the difference between sales and marketing”), ensuring that readers understand how the fields interact and complement each other. Hayward's writing is clear and straightforward, and the relatively short book contains a substantial amount of information. Anecdotes from Hayward's employers and clients serve as illustrations for the concepts presented, giving readers concrete examples that make the theoretical explanations even more effective. Veterans of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis may not feel they need a refresher in the tool, but the book's description of the process offers useful new insights through an exercise Hayward presents in workshops. The book's audience is not primarily the sales representatives and marketers who interact with market segmentation, product demonstrations, and conversion rates on a regular basis, but the executives who oversee them without fully understanding their impact on the business, and for those readers, Hayward has created an effective and informative overview of the key elements of strategy and implementation that have the potential to drive revenue and improve outcomes.

A well-written discussion of sales and marketing as contributors to corporate success.