Shift: 19 Practical, Business-Driven Ideas for an Executive in Charge of Marketing but Not Trained for the Task

If you are responsible for driving growth in your business but have run out of levers to pull, are frustrated with wasted money on ad agencies and dead in the water marketing ideas, sales that just never seem to get closed...then add Shift to your reading list. Shift is written for the executives who find themselves in charge of marketing but are not trained for the task. Clear, concise storytelling cuts right to the heart of today's business issues and offers proven approaches the author gleaned over years of helping these same business executives find revenue through better marketing and sales efforts. The authors goal of this book is a big one: to profoundly change how leaders of small to midsized B2B businesses think about and direct the marketing function of their businesses. SHIFT will inspire, encourage and empower business leaders to be more successful. This is not a book of limited tactical ideas or art school creative thinking. It offers a strategic, business-school approach designed to equip business leaders with the knowledge and insights they need to use marketing as it was intended as a serious business tool that drives new sales and new growth. Shift explores 19 practical ideas that can transform your marketing efforts, and by natural extension, your profitability. Shift is broken into three sections: Rethinking the Discipline; Connecting Marketing with Sales; and Planning and Implementation. It is not meant as a theoretical discussion, but a practical guide to help you add repeatability, measurability, accountability and effectiveness to the budget you assign to marketing. What you will find inside is 19 practical ideas that can transform marketing efforts; In practice sections that will help you apply the ideas presented right now; a science-based framework for marketing; ways to look at the role of marketing in your company; 5 fatal flaws that derail sales; ways marketing and sales should be, no must be, working together; how to leverage your unique abilities; knowing what to measure in marketing, determining ROI; and an executives guide to what maters online, even in social media. Practical and helpful, this book helps executives see through the haze of marketing nonsense to focus on marketing that actually drives sales. While bookstores are filled how-to and step-by-step, Shift points you to what executives find essential. In Shift you will learn about 6 stages all buyers pass through on the path to a purchase; 9 process that help move a prospect through to a sale; 4 conversion points to observe and focus resources; and how to identify the barriers to sales, the ones that are holding you back from profit. Working side by side with owners and executives who fight the battles of business day-to-day, Sean M Doyle, shares the lessons he's learned and pushes past the rhetoric that too many marketing types and Fortune-500 MBA types hide behind. Shift guides you to find practical solutions that work. Most of my clients don't have the luxury of chewing on ideas endlessly and considering among alternatives, notes Doyle, they live with the daily need to make payroll, while dancing around the obstacles of regulation and competition. My experience is that owners and executives prefer answers to rhetoric; they prefer action and evolution to the fruitless pursuit of perfection at 5x the cost and twice the time to implement. Over the years, I've worked with international companies like Georgia Pacific, the Southeastern Conference (yes, the college sport empire), BBVA Compass, one of the largest banks on the globe. But the simple truth is that I've spent most of my career working with the $5MM to $80MM companies that make up most of American business. It's in that space that teachings in this book can have the most profound impact.