This quote came from Greg Alexander’s “Book Review: McKinsey’s Sales Book” on the Sales Benchmark Index blog.
By one of those strange quirks of Internet fate, on the same day I also read a post about one of the author’s of the same book on Bob Apollo’s Inflexion Point blog: “Exclusive McKinsey Interview: Finding the Mountaintops in Your Markets”
What a fascinating difference in two responses to the same book!
Please, please read both posts to form your own opinion but as I see it, Greg Alexander has raced through it (I’m not convinced I could power through 256 pages in three hours and I read a lot!) and mostly doesn’t like it.
He does praise some sections but overall, his review left a bad taste in my mouth. The overall feel I got was that he doesn’t like the fact that the authors are not and have never been salespeople. He seems to cling very strongly to the belief that “you have to walk a mile in my shoes to know me.” It almost smacks of some sort of reverse snobbery. This is a shame because I generally rate the quality of his blog posts as very high.
In contrast, Bob has focused on one of the key strategies in the book, micro-segmentation, and put together an extremely useful primer on how to make it work in a B2B environment.
It could be argued that what Bob has to say falls into the category ‘obvious’ but, as sales people, we know all too well how often people do not do the obvious things. If they did, we would all be hitting our targets every time!
Sometimes, the obvious only becomes so when it is pointed out to us.
Bizarrely, both pieces make me want to buy the book and form my own judgement on the source material.
Tell me what you think about these contrasting blog posts and, if you have actually read the book, what you think of it. Is it a useful addition to the bookshelf or not?
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