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Title: Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive : Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition by Harvey Mackay ISBN: 0-449-91148-9 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 August, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.43 (28 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Not just for Sales People
Comment: One of the first business books I read. There are a lot of basic business lessons in this book. My business partner and I have quoted him for years because his lessons apply to entrepreneurs, not just sales people.
Most companies don't seem to know the first thing about customer service. This book will remind or teach you that the details are important if you want to keep customers coming back.
Rating: 5
Summary: One Of The Great Business Books
Comment: "Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive" is Harvey Mackay's classic business book and one of my personal favorites. Each business lesson is only about one and a half pages long, so you don't need a shark's appetite to gobble it down.
Some of my favorite Mackay lessons:
-- The most important clause in a contract isn't a clause. It's dealing with honest people.
-- Mackay's Dad's advice: "It doesn't matter how many pails of milk you spill, just so you don't lose the cow." (Mackay's from Minnesota where business advice is often phrased in terms of cows. Often entrepreneurs make mistakes that cost them money, but that's not as bad as making a mistake that destroys the company. Don't be afraid to be creative and test things to find out what works best. Non-Minnesotans can think goose and golden egg. Mackay says that for the first five years after purchasing a small, struggling envelope manufacturing company with a revenue of $200,000, he "...teetered between bankruptcy and insanity." But, he didn't lose the cow. Today, Mackay Envelope has a revenue of about $85 million, if I recall correctly.)
--Know something about your customer as well as your product. Mackay does an excellent job here. He develops the Mackay 66 which is a profile of your customers. It asks such things as: What are your customer's hobbies? Interests? Political and religious orientation? Knowing the customer is important in relating to him or her.
Mackay says the same principle is crucial to establishing contacts with influential people. Learn something about the person, so you have an idea of their hobbies, interest, values, etc. Then, you'll know what hot buttons interest them. And, what topics to avoid.
For example, many, many, many years ago, when Mackay met Fidel Castro, Mackay asked Fidel how he kept in great shape. Castro, who prided himself on his physical prowess, told Mackay he was an active bowler. (Note to bowlers: Take up jogging. Give up the cigars.) When, Mackay told Castro that he was a champion bowler in college, Castro became excited to have met someone who shared a similar interest.
--Believe in yourself. Mackay, an avid sports fan, discusses runners first achieving the four-minute mile. Many people believed that running a four-minute mile was impossible (for me, it is!), but after the first runner achieved it and showed it could be done, many other runners broke the four-minute mile, until doing so was necessary to be competitive.
--Never give a speech once. Practice it in front of a test audience. That way you'll find out what jokes bomb and can cut them. Mackay is considered one of the very best public speakers in the world, and he gives some advice about public speaking in this book.
Speaking and communication are valuable business skills. Mackay writes: "Learn to use the language. Written and spoken. Anyone who's a word dink has got it made." We word dinks like that! Although I'm not so sure it's fully true for everyone. But, at something over $20,000 per pop for a speech, with a nationally-syndicated small business column, and over eight million books sold, dinking around with words certainly hasn't hurt Mackay.
Mackay writes: "Like most salespeople, I've spent a lifetime trying to build a network of customers and friends... . There are two ways to do it: retail and wholesale. Retail means the one-at-a-time kind of contacts that are built up through participation in community and social activities. Wholesale means the recognition, and acceptance, extended by people who don't know you personally but who have heard about you as a speaker, read your articles, or read about your civic activities in the paper."
This is the sort of book I like to reread every few years. I highly recommend it to entrepreneurs and people interested in business. Salespeople, negotiators, and avid sports fans will enjoy it the most.
Peter Hupalo, Author of "Thinking Like An Entrepreneur."
Rating: 4
Summary: *****
Comment: Some good nuggets in here. But if he were a great businessman, he wouldn't have gone into a commodity business like envelopes. He himself says, "the margins are razor thin." And because it's such a commodity business, he needs to really overwhelm his customers, which includes his keeping extensive files on them, including information such as whether a customer is a member of alcoholics anonymous. A supplier keeping personal info about me like that in a file would make me want to cut him off as a supplier.
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Title: Beware the Naked Man Who Offers You His Shirt : Do What You Love, Love What You Do, and Deliver More Than You Promise by Harvey Mackay ISBN: 0449911845 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Dig Your Well before You're Thirsty : The only networking book you'll ever need by Harvey Mackay ISBN: 0385485468 Publisher: Currency Pub. Date: 16 February, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Pushing the Envelope All the Way to the Top by Harvey Mackay ISBN: 0449006697 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 02 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School : Notes From A Street-Smart Executive by Mark H. McCormack ISBN: 0553345834 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 June, 1986 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: How to Build a Network of Power Relationships by Harvey Mackay ISBN: 0671536834 Publisher: Nightingale-Conant Corporation Pub. Date: November, 1995 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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