Invisible Sale, The: How to Build a Digitally Powered Marketing and Sales System to Better Prospect, Qualify and Close Leads (Que Biz-Tech)

This book is practical, useful and very insightful.I must say I buy & read an awful lot of business books from Amazon each year, but this year, Tom Martin’s book is only the second book (after Perry Marshall’s 80/20 Sales & Marketing), that I find so useful, practical and insightful.Unlike most business books I have read these past few years, which are mostly written to launch the authors’ consulting careers, “The Invisible Sale” is the real deal and I certainly got my moneys’ worth from reading it.It has now taken its place on my desk as a reference manual.My main passion at the moment is, helping businesses & brands which struggle to get good results from their digital marketing efforts, set up systems which predictably, effectively, efficiently and profitably bring in a steady stream of quality leads, customers and clients.This books shows you all the above and more in a step-by-step manner.You can also expect to learn how to:- Setup a painless prospecting framework,- Create content of various types – video, photos, audio, text webinars, etc.- Setup a content creation & distribution framework- And more.I particularly liked the frameworks which the author shared in the book. Anybody can take and adapt them to their own situation or businessI highly recommend this book.

It's not about the book, it is more about me and where I am at!. There are some good hints, tips and pointers in here, I'm just having to work to make them fit my one man leadership consulting business. I've got some good ideas that I now need to understand how to make them fit into my world.

There's a funny story behind this review. I rarely write reviews, but in this case, I just have to, because of the impact this book has had on my own business. But let's start at the beginning:Tom Martin begins his book by really bringing home the message that the playing field of sales has changed due to the internet. No longer need potential buyers rely on sales people to educate themselves about your or your competitors' products. In contrast, they are educating themselves via the web. Today, when one of your sales guys gets a call, that person calling is likely to be near the end of the sales funnel already. But he has been invisible so far (hence the title "The Invisible Sale").Tom Martin's book offers a way to take advantage of these developments. First of all, you should stop thinking about the sales funnel as a funnel. Today, that funnel is rather like a sales radar where potential buyers pop up, enter and exit constantly. The remainder of the book is devoted to showing you exactly how to set up that sales radar and use it to make those invisible prospects visible.A key concept to this end is "propinquity" - for the purpose of the book, that concept means that people are most likely to buy from people or companies they repeatedly bumped into while doing their own research online - ideally in the context of helpful and educational content. Here's where a lot of people - myself included - start to lose track. There are so many social networks, so many websites. How do you identify where you should have a presence? Tom Martin provides a solid step-by-step process to help you make that decision.And when I say step-by-step, I mean step-by-step. In contrast to other so-called how-to books that actually tell you only WHAT to do but stop short of telling you HOW to do it, "The Invisible Sale" provides real, actionable how-to information. This is especially helpful in those sections of the book where he shows you how to create specific types of content, such as video or podcasts. He even goes as far as recommending specific products and apps. I loved that.Which brings me back to the beginning of this review. I'm a freelance copywriter who works with a lot of small start-up companies. Originally, I bought this book in order to be able to increase my project income, by providing inbound marketing advice, which some of those small companies really need. I never expected to actually use that advice in my own business. After all, I'm just one person, so I have to concentrate my marketing efforts on those areas that yield the biggest ROI for my time and money.For me, that meant prospecting and networking. Blogging? Takes way too much time and yields too little return, so I dismissed it. Well, I was wrong. Thanks to Tom Martin, I learned that I thought about content creation in a completely wrong way. Content creation doens't have to take that much time, if you follow Tom Martin's content creation framework of cornerstones and cobblestones. That was the golden nugget I got from the book. In essence, that framework revolves around repurposing your content in any way you can. You should never use content only once. On top of that, you get a whole lot of helpful tips on how to create content faster.I am now adding painless porspecting as taught by "The Invisible Sale" to my marketing approach. Because after reading this book, I am convinced that, a) it's doable even for a one-person business, and b) that the long-term payoffs will far outweigh the effort I'll have to put in.