If you aren’t familiar with Gary Vaynerchuck, his latest book Crush It! will introduce you to why he is such a sought-after speaker, consultant, and inspirational figure.

Gary’s enthusiasm is contagious and nothing short of inspiring.

Passion

Crush It! centers around pursuing your passion and how that can lead to financial success. Gary outlines his journey as an entrepreneur and discusses how you, too, can chase your personal interests and build your personal brand as a viable lifestyle.

Personal Brand

Granted, the slant of this book is to prepare you to do your own thing, leave your job, and live your passion. However, the author has very important points about building your personal brand. This brand can be transferred anywhere and used not just in your current job or company, but anywhere your expertise is relevant.

Gary outlines how he moved from running his family’s wine business to becoming an online star and entrepreneurial icon.

Tools

Crush It! steps you through some of the online tools you can use to build your personal brand and, in turn, your personal success. While this isn’t a step-by-step guide on how to use social media and online technologies, it does point you in the right direction on how to get started.

Hard Work

As the core of this book revolves around cashing in on your passion, it will help you identify what your passion even is. This isn’t a get-rich-quick book. To the contrary, Gary is very honest in how much hard work it took him to get where he is and how hard you’ll need to work to achieve your dreams.

Inspiration

If you have a day job, this book will inspire you to reach for greater heights. You can be an expert and go-to person for whatever you are passionate about. That may or may not be related to your job.

If you own your own business, this book will help you realize that you probably aren’t working hard enough to achieve the success and potential that is waiting for you.

At a minimum, Crush It! and Gary’s exuberance will inspire you to take action. After all, you have to take a first step sometime if you hope to get anywhere.

Recommendation: Listen to this Book!

Gary actually “wrote” this book by speaking it and then had a ghost writer put it together for print. By doing this, his voice and animated examples come to life in the written word.

I listened to the audiobook version of Crush It! and would recommend you do the same. Gary himself recorded the audio version and interjects “off script” commentary as he goes along.

Read or listen to Crush It! and you will be motivated and inspired.

You can find Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion on Amazon.com.

Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson tackles the changing landscape of pricing in his book
Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

Having read Anderson’s original article in Wired magazine, I was skeptical that a full-length book would be able to elaborate on his claims.

I was pleasantly surprised that the book kept my attention and was actually entertaining and informative.

What is in Free?

Anderson covers the history of “free” and how it has evolved in commerce to what it is today. As I enjoy history, this was an interesting component of the book.

The main premise of the book is that the cost of digital goods is decreasing so rapidly that the incremental cost of one more customer is essentially zero. Thus you see that companies are able to offer their products and services online for free to millions of users.

Anderson explains how many web-based services survive while appearing to charge their customers nothing.

Free pulls back the curtain of the business models of many companies that leverage the zero dollar price point to their profit. You’ll learn how companies defy common paradigms and essentially turn pricing models upside down.

Free is Free

I was intrigued by how this book was marketed. Since it is called Free and talks about making lots of things “free” the book should be, well, free. Right?

Well, the book is free. Really.

At its initial launch, the book was offered in many formats for free. I listened to a free audio book version of Free read by the author.

While many of the free versions have disappeared after the initial hype, you can still listen to the free audio version on audible.com.

Recommendation: Read it

If you are selling any product or service, this book will help you think through your options on what to charge customers. Don’t be scared by giving something away for free, just be sure you know how you will monetize that transaction with the customer. This book will show you how.

Prefer a tangible, physical copy of the book? Order a copy of Free: The Future of a Radical Price on Amazon.com.

Joker One: A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood is not a book about customer service or business. However, this book is full of insights into what makes a great leader and how, just like Marines in battle, your business will encounter a lot of surprises.

Joker One is the account of a Marine platoon that patrolled the Iraqi city of Ramadi in 2004. The story is told by the platoon’s leader, then Lieutenant Donnovan Campbell. It is a story of the brotherhood that forms in war and the love that these soldiers share.

Like the book 1776, Joker One contains stories that provide great parallels to how your business can succeed.

The frustrations, pain, suffering, surprises, successes, sacrifice, and leadership in Joker One are truly inspiring.

Turning these principles to business, they bring up many self-searching, evaluating questions:

• What kind of leadership do you have running your organization?
• How dedicated are your employees to your company and its goals despite the trials thereof?
• Do you plan meticulously only to have those plans fall apart when the realities of business hit?
• How do you measure success?
• Where do you draw the line between meeting a goal and the sacrifice it takes to do so?
• Your competition takes on many different forms and is around every corner. Do you know how to identify them?
• Can you rapidly adapt to a changing environment to meet both the needs of your employees and your customers?
• Do you train, keep learning, and continue growing to be ready for upcoming changes?

Should you read Joker One?

Buy the book – If you enjoy military history, Joker One is a touching and inspirational story that will both give you insights into the realities of this modern conflict and a great appreciation for the sacrifice these Marines made for others.

Like a parable, you will have to extract the principles and practices that will apply to your business.

Buy Joker One: A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood from Amazon.com.

The concepts and principles that Claude C. Hopkins teaches in his Scientific Advertising are so relevant and timeless that you’d think they were written this year. In fact, Hopkins penned his book at the beginning of the 20th century.

The only thing out of date in this book are the dollar amounts he mentions in his examples. Of course there was no Internet back in Hopkins’ day, so his advertising examples are based primarily on direct mailings.

Hopkins covers the vital importance of testing everything you do. What is working? What do customers prefer? You’ll never know until you test.

The author also reminds us that we need to track the results of our advertising and campaigns. Shotgun blast broad mass media isn’t effective. We need to target our specific customer by only serving our message up to them and writing the headline and ad such that it speaks to them alone.

His chapter on samples was very interesting to me. After I read his book, my eyes have been opened to all the companies around that are wasting money on ineffectual giveaways and promotions.

A lot of what Hopkins teaches may sound familiar. It should! His work is the basis for most modern advertising and marketing. If you take his book and apply the principles therein, you can save a lot of money by not having to buy the latest and greatest from marketing gurus.

Should You Read Scientific Advertising?

Buy the book – If you are involved in any way in crafting the copy writing of advertisements or anything that a customer will see, you need to read Claude Hopkins’ Scientific Advertising. It will establish a firm foundation and mindset for effectively using your ads and even business practices to get the best return on investment possible.

Want a compelling read that will change the way you think about the customer experience? Try Subject to Change, compiled by a handful of authors at product experience strategy and design firm Adaptive Path.

Focus: Customer Experience

The world in which we do business is changing rapidly and to be successful, we must focus on the customer experience.

This means you can’t really bet on the longest feature list or efficiency advantages to beat out the competition:

The processes for measuring and controlling efficiency are well-known and well-documented, and so in today’s world they no longer provide a significant competitive advantage.

Since you won’t be able to do everything, you have to be selective in your strategy. This involves deciding what to do and what not to do.

Design is a Keystone

The authors proudly proclaim that “design must become an organizational competency.” Everyone is a designer, not just the official design team your company may have. “Design is an activity” that involves empathy with the customer, problem solving, and prototyping of options.

Empathy

To the customers, the experience they have is the only thing that matters.

After all your product does (or doesn’t do), the experience a person has with you and your product is what will leave the biggest impression. To make this as smooth as possible, you need to understand where a customer is coming from:

An appreciation of customer’s motivations, behaviors, and context leads to the development of a product, service, or system that can satisfy them.

Too often we may rely on reports or surveys to gain insight into customer intent. Nevertheless, we have to go “beyond statistics or extrapolation from [our] own behaviors” if we want to truly empathize with customers.

You can’t shoehorn people into generic “users” or “customers.” Your customers aren’t all the same, they are different and will do things you didn’t foresee and in ways you didn’t imagine. Truly understanding a customer can come from effective research.

Customer Research

Design research needs to inspire and indicate a clear direction.

Research for research’s sake isn’t worth the effort. The output must be understandable and actionable.

One of the authors, Todd Wilkens, stated that “the effectiveness of a research report is inversely proportional to the thickness of its binding.”

When implementing a new product or feature, ask yourself these questions:

What do people want to accomplish?
How does this activity fit into their lives?
How can I deliver on those desires?

Corporate Structure vs. Customer View

Your company is made up of silos of groups and divisions. However, to your customer, you are just “the company.” How can you make that customer experience uniform and make you actually look like your right hand knows what your left is doing?

The book refers to this as a “coordinated symphony that addresses the whole customer experience.” Nice imagery.

Contingency Design

Not everything you make will work perfectly.

The true success of experience design isn’t how well it works when everything is operating as planned, but how well it works when things start going wrong.

The more you add or build into your product, the more likely that it will “fall apart and confuse customers.” Avoid the dreaded feature creep. By keeping things simple, your customers will be more likely to succeed.

Create the Long Wow

You can achieve long-term customer loyalty by systematically impressing your customers.

One of the authors, Brandon Schauer, explains “The Long Wow” and how to achieve it in his essay and this presentation:

Keep Going

Succeeding amidst uncertainty requires continuous improvement.

You can’t sit still or even just get by with what worked in the past. Continuous improvement, and its associated change, will help you meet the needs of customers and deliver great products and services.

Joe’s Recommendation

Buy the book – Subject to Change is a very quick read that helps shake up the paradigms to which you or your business may be accustomed. This will foster some healthy self-evaluation and discussion of your business.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is the best business book I’ve read in quite some time. Chip and Dan Heath teach you how to make the ideas you are trying to convey to others memorable and actionable. In other words, “sticky” so your listener can’t help but remember what you talked about.

This book is broken down into several sections, with each section elaborating on a different letter of their “sticky” formula: SUCCESs (Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotional, Stories). When you use the SUCCESs steps, people will remember your ideas, internalize them, and take steps towards what you want them to do.

Simple

You need to boil your ideas down to their basic, simple core. This often means avoiding the “curse of knowledge,” frequently mentioned by the authors, which is: when you know something, it is hard to remember that other people don’t also have that knowledge.

Simple messages are easy to remember, easy to convey to others, and easy to understand.

Unexpected

People are used to finding patterns in life. You have to break this cycle if you want your idea to be effectively communicated. Breaking patterns by sharing the unexpected grabs the listener’s attention. For example, newspaper headlines (starting with the end result and working backward).

Concrete

Tangible ideas are easy to remember. Abstract, vague, or jargon-filled ideas are difficult to remember and hard to internalize. Think of Aesop’s timeless fables like “The Tortoise and the Hare” or “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” These ideas are so solid, you can almost touch them and thus they are extremely easy to remember.

Credible

No one will believe your idea if you aren’t credible. If you are already an expert in the field, great. If not, you may need others to add the missing credibility.

Emotional

Does your idea engage the emotions of others? If you can help the listener view themselves enjoying the benefits of your idea, you’ll have them hooked.

Stories

Since the beginning of time, we’ve loved to hear stories. You can better convey your idea when it is the moral of a story. Keep your eyes open for compelling stories from which you can extract your own idea.

Joe’s Recommendation

Buy a copy – Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is a great read that keeps you entertained and delivers actionable steps you can use to improve your communication, ideas, and messaging.

The Heath brothers essentially eat their own dog food by applying the SUCCESs steps as they present countless stories and examples throughout the book.

This book is a classic and worthy of your attention and a place on your reference shelf.

In The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs, authors Bill Price and David Jaffe seek to challenge the traditional view of customer service.

While the title is a bit daring, “no service” isn’t really the solution the authors are proposing. Through an eight step process, they outline how your company can refine its customer service by identifying and fixing problems and enabling customers via self-service.

Prevention

A majority of customer service problems can be resolved up-front by identifying the root cause of issues. These may be problems with packaging, customer expectations, instructions, etc. Your company can prevent problems from even happening by having a feedback loop, ensuring that those who hear from the customers send the information back to those that can fix the problem.

Self Service

The real “no service” option is that of quality self-service. With current technology, customers should be able to solve the majority of their problems via your website or even your phone system. If customers can find the answers they need online and can take corrective action, they will solve their own problems.

Listen and Act

Too many times the customer service department insulates the rest of a company from customer feedback. R&D, Marketing, Sales, Manufacturing, IT, and others need to hear what is wrong so they can actually fix it! Listen to your customers and act on that information. Otherwise, you’ll just keep getting the same inquiries and issues every day.

Joe’s Recommendation

Buy a Copy – The Best Service is No Service will change the way your company thinks about customer service.

They share numerous examples of both the good, the bad, and the ugly. You’ll see how other companies were successful (or not) in serving customers and can then apply those principles to your situation. This was a very thought provoking book.

Buy The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs on Amazon.com.

In his book Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites, Kevin Potts, an Internet veteran and blogger, offers a great guide to help you improve your current site or build the next one from scratch.

Throughout the book, the author clearly demonstrates his understanding of web users and provides solutions that best help turn them into customers.

Clear Examples

The strength of this book lies in its clear examples. Potts provides both screen shots and detailed analysis that will help you apply the principles to your individual situation. He covers everything from accessibility to navigation to corporate blogging and ecommerce.

This book compiles numerous best practices and usable designs that you will be able to leverage as you work on your website.

How-To Pointers

For the technically inclined, Potts offers some quick “how-to” pieces with examples of HTML, Javascript, or CSS. Additionally, he includes website references if you want to learn more about implementing some of his recommendations. This book isn’t a technical book as it mostly demonstrates best practices and then points you in the right direction for the implementation.

Joe’s Recommendation

Buy a Copy – Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites is a great reference to have on your shelf. When it comes time to work on a section of your site, you can review the recommendations in the corresponding chapter. You probably won’t read this entire book in one sitting. Weighing in at over 350 pages, it is best to pick and choose the sections that are applicable to you.

Buy Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites on Amazon.com.

Jeffrey Gitomer’s Little Green Book of Getting Your Way follows in the tradition of his other “little books” and delivers some solid advice on how to persuade others.

Gitomer knows that you have many different venues for convincing others to do what you want. These may be via speeches, presentations, writing, emails, phone calls, and more.

Getting Your Way starts by talking generally about persuading others to your way of thinking. A lot of Gitomer’s writing focuses on building your self confidence so that you can actually visualize and believe in what you want to achieve. Building on that, he introduces you to the concept that a key to getting your way is to understand those you are trying to convince. Once you understand their motivations and needs, you can tailor your message to be more effective.

Gitomer gives hundreds of speeches a year. He shares his secrets for success from his public speaking experience throughout the book.

He touts that he is never nervous when giving a speech. How does he do that? He “owns” his presentation. It isn’t memorized, but rather he knows it inside and out. Being fully prepared is a powerful foundation that gives you not only confidence but flexibility in presenting.

Another key point he makes about presentations is getting your audience to laugh. Now, you can’t just tell a cheesy joke and call it humor. If you get people laughing, they are more likely to not only pay attention but also believe you and take action in your favor.

Since Gitomer is a salesman by trade, most of his examples have to do with sales presentations and following up with prospects. The principles he teaches are sound and apply not only to that arena but also to your marketing materials and online copy writing.

Joe’s Recommendation

Buy a Copy – I found some gems in this book and am sure you will too. The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, although a quick read, delivers great tips that can improve your persuasion techniques.

Buy Little Green Book of Getting Your Way from Amazon.com.

We all say that we love our customers and always do the best we can for them. Of course we do! Our “customer satisfaction” scores are high!

Jeffrey Gitomer’s customer service manifesto Customer Satisfaction is Worthless, Customer Loyalty Is Priceless teaches exactly why the “satisfaction” mindset is a lie and why customer loyalty is what matters to your long-term business success.

Loyalty is What Counts

Anyone can be satisfied with your business or product. That doesn’t guarantee that they will become repeat customers. Nor does that mean they will refer their friends and family to you.

Satisfaction is truly worthless as this book’s title boldly proclaims. Your business needs loyal, faithful, and referral-generating customers.

Story Telling

This book is written in Gitomer’s usual style with untraditional font styles and sizes scattered around for emphasis. He shares numerous stories of his customer service experiences and then extracts the best practices and ideas for improving your interactions with customers.

“Wow” Experience

Gitomer, as a customer, is always on the hunt for a “wow” experience. Does your business simply process customers as just another number? Or do you make each interaction a personal and memorable one?

Self Evaluation

Customer Satisfaction is Worthless has multiple self-tests and checklists where you can measure your current level of customer service. These offer great opportunities to identify areas of improvement. Most of the author’s suggestions are things you, as an individual, can do and they don’t require a big bureaucratic change to implement.

Company Policy

One point Gitomer makes that really resonated with me concerned company policies. Do you hide behind company policies so you can avoid doing something for a customer? Your company will always have policies but you don’t have to simply state “sorry, that is against company policy.” Instead, use: “in order to be fair to every one…” The latter is a much gentler approach that may very well diffuse a heated customer exchange.

Joe’s Recommendation

Buy a Copy – Customer Satisfaction is Worthless, Customer Loyalty Is Priceless is a must-read for your business. If you interact with customers in any way (which odds are you do), you need to read this book.

Buy Customer Satisfaction is Worthless, Customer Loyalty Is Priceless on Amazon.com.