Three Steps to Yes
Everybody has to sell something sometime. We're not just talking about salespeople making quotas. Parents have to sell their kids on the idea of eating vegetables and not taking drugs; managers have to sell their employees on the idea of showing up on time and producing. Getting your message across requires selling yourself and your ideas in a way that guarantees a positive response from the most stubborn listener.Gene Bedell spent a lifetime selling, but he changed his method when he discovered a better way. Three Steps to Yes shows you how to move anyone from no to yes in just three simple steps. It enables you to get people to do what you ask them to do and believe what you want them to believe without being a bully, damaging your relationships, or compromising your principles. All the old-fashioned persuasion techniques -- authoritative power, punishment, rewards, verbal manipulation, relationship selling, negotiation -- will be a thing of the past once you make this breakthrough three-step technique a part of your life. Three Steps to Yes isn't a book of selling tricks.
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What Hacker News says
- You might find "Three Steps to Yes" by Gene Bedell helpful.
Much of the content is obvious in isolation, but put together it helps orient your outlook.
- I was lucky that during my research time I got to know Dawkin's work. And the journey started there:
1. "Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People" by Steven Vogel. If you were fascinated by the wings of birds or little waves behind the plants in water read this. Fascinating book!
2. "The meme machine" by Susan Blackmore. Starting off where Dawkin's book ended.
3. "Three steps to yes" by Gene Bedell, beside Getting to Yes already mentioned here.
- "Marketing and sales seem to be about un-Truth"
Although it's easy to see why you would think this, it is a misconception that is costing you dearly, in ways you don't even understand yet.
I highly recommend you get a copy of "Three Steps to Yes: The Gentle Art of Getting Your Way" by Gene Bedell. He applies the same sales principles to any social situation where you're trying to get your way, whether convincing a partner to go on vacation to your chosen destination or selling software.
Suppose your partner just wants to tan at the beach, but you want to go rock climbing. Crucially, they may not want to admit (even to themselves) that this is what they want. A bit of empathy and creative thinking can lead to a solution where e.g. you go climbing a few days and you stay at a hotel with a nice spa for them.
That software buyer may only be interested in not losing their job, rather than the cost savings of the software. How do you show that person that you've done this at other companies to put them at ease? Can you see how useful understanding that prospects mentality could be?
Marketing is this kind of work at a larger scale. What it is people want to buy? How will you price it? Where will people find out about it and buy it? These fundamentals are hard to pin down and some practitioners are sleazy liars. Yet even without being an entrepreneur, just as an employee, you can try to answer those questions -- and that's marketing.
Learning more about these fields will let you spot good practitioners; working with them can be a boon to your career.
- Marketing and sales are about story telling and influencing would be customers, so that they can see a need for the product you offer. For me, I have found the list of books below to be very informative. Note, they are not listed in any particular order. I mostly listen to the audio or mp3 versions, that way i can just play them as i do other things. Most of them have actionable steps and are not just high level talk.
a. Spin Selling by Neil Rackham
b. 50 ScientificallyWays to Be Persuasive by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, Robert B. Cialdini
c. Three Steps to Yes by Gene Bedell; -Only print, no audio
d. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
e. How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- I don't know if these are the "Masters" of the field, but they come highly recommended as useful books. Several are on my to-do list:
-Crossing the Chasm
-Web Copy That Sells
-Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
-Three Steps to Yes: The Gentle Art of Getting Your Way
-Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
-Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets
-Copy Hackers (I've read these and they are very good)
