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Title: The End of Selling...As We Know It: An Executive's Guide to Customer Creation by Larry Welke ISBN: 0-7596-1331-1 Publisher: 1stBooks Library Pub. Date: February, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.98

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (3 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Buy one (today) for every member of your sales staff
Comment: The Father of Software Sales has provided a remarkable look into the art of selling. Long before most of the current software users and salespeople were even born, Larry Welke was helping to launch the industry through his directories and magazines.

Now, Welke gives us insight into what drives a user to license a software product or suite, and provides a roadmap for the sellers and buyers to meet for their common good.

If you are in sales or marketing, and enjoyed Spencer Johnson's Who Moved My Cheese, you must get this book. It brings home all of the sales issues you have been striving to corral. It's a quick read, yet you'll thank Larry for years ... as have the titans of the software industry.

Rating: 5
Summary: Welke Continues Icon-Busting Selling Ideas
Comment: Larry A. Welke's "The End of Selling...As We Know It" continues his 40-plus years of challenging conventional wisdom about the selling and marketing of mostly high-end products. And that is the fun of his new book. If your decision-making in marketing and sales has been on auto-pilot, this book puts the stick back in your hands.

Welke, a 1954 graduate of Marquette University (Economics), went to work for IBM after a short stint with General Electric. IBM, perhaps the greatest marketing machine of the last half of the 20th century, gave Welke lessons both in what to do and, as it faltered in the personal computer business, not to do. Over seven years he became a top salesman by, among other things, courting clients in chauffeur-driven Jaguars, a practice that won business but drove the image-conscious IBM hierarchy nuts.

Welke left IBM and, in 1967, formed his own company, International Computer Programs, Inc., the first software information company anywhere. During his three decades at the helm of ICP, he taught sales training to hundreds of aspiring software salespersons around the world. Early on the challenge was one every new software merchant stumbled over but which Welke relished: How do you persuade businesses that were used to getting their software free -- just thrown in with the hardware they bought -- to start paying serious money for it?

That Welke's seminars and publications had the answer gave him the appellation "Father of the Software Industry" (the independent software industry went from $300 million in sales when he joined it to around a hundred billion today). It also gave him a reputation as a rogue marketer with some compelling ideas, which is why his sales training seminars continue to sell out to this day.

The essential point of "The End of Selling..." is that changes in exposure media -- principally the Internet -- have fundamentally altered the way a sale is done, contact to contract. It altered the way clients first hear about a product, learn more about it, explore its viability in their context, make sales contacts, and even pay for and deliver it. Beyond that it affects the way customers are supported, complaints are handled, products are critiqued, new versions are developed, and hands are held.

The failures of the dot coms, he believes, stems from the inability of the mostly youthful entrepreneurs to merge their new-century automated sites with a little last-century humanity. (Imagine a prospective customer, money in hand, lost in an HTML maze that cannot answer the one question he has that would close the sale for him.)

Welke believes that the Internet and other interactive media will fulfil their promise once entrepreneurs (and established merchants just getting into the new media) forget selling as they once knew it (20th century) and as they think they know it now (21st century), and merge the two into a symbiosis he calls "customer creation."

The best way to think of customer creation is to imagine that the up-close selling of knocking on sequential doors to introduce yourself has been replaced with technology that can introduce you to literally scores of millions more prospects. But having made that introduction, those prospects need to be addressed not in a single rigid manner adopted by the company (a formula Web site), but in the manner in which THEY wish to be individually addressed (and, ultimately, sold). That would include a flexible system of technology-based marketing mixed with an informed support staff of living people who are easily contacted.

There is much more to customer creation that we can outline here, but suffice it to say that Welke has a lot of experience with the concept and a lot of fun sharing it. His decades in sales, marketing and chief executive offices give him a long view too many other authors lack. "The End of Selling..." will take you off auto-pilot and make you think.

Rating: 5
Summary: What an eye opener!
Comment: This book makes sense out of the complexities (even chaos) of today's information-rich marketplace. It provides solid recommendations on how to capitalize on the changing roles of buyers and sellers. "The End of Selling..." is a must-read for anyone even associated with selling or customer service.