ROAR! Get Heard in the Sales and Marketing Jungle – A Business Fable
By Kevin Daum with Daniel A. Turner
John Wiley & Sons, 2010
Reviewed by Robert Nersesian for the New York Journal of Books - http://tinyurl.com/yycrgyl
April 14, 2010
Here are the facts as your reviewer understands them:
- We are still in a recession with high unemployment.
- The brutal economy seems to have had no effect on the number of new business books out there. At my local really, really big bookstore there were 203 books alone on how to be a successful salesman. (Yes, I counted them on your behalf, dear reader.)
- As of the last census, there were some 14 million salespeople in the U.S., divided almost equally between the sexes – numbers surpassing those in healthcare, transportation, manufacturing and a host of other occupations.
Selling and sales may or may not be the world’s oldest profession (a debate more for anthropologists than online book reviewers), but it is certainly humankind’s most ancient skill – from the infant wailing for a change of diaper to a spouse hinting at the need for a new convertible, we are all selling something.
Despite its ubiquity, the salesperson’s job is as tough as any in the marketplace. One sage has theorized there are only two jobs that really matter in the corporation: the salesman facing the customer and the chairman accountable to the shareowner.
Your reviewer has had several close professional brush-ups with sales and marketing types. Such practitioners cannot be stamped as any particular personality. There are opportunists and persuaders, team players, drama kings and queens.
But because they are the revenue generators of the front line, sales forces are often likened to infantry, football scrums, shock troops and Special Forces. As hackneyed is the imagery used to "motivate" such people. Sports are always popular with its themes of striving and tales of gladiatorial combat.
Once at my former employer, “Blue Crush" was the sales theme for the year. I think it had to do with battling “Big Blue” IBM. No one, however, vetted the phrase or noticed that a movie with the same name about three surfer girls had just passed through theaters. Or maybe they didn’t care.
Just to really toss the metaphorical salad, our sales VP, a six-foot-eight, 280-pound ex-Marine colonel from Desert Storm, would give motivational speeches at sales rallies while randomly throwing little blue foam footballs into the audience. Such pep talks might have worked against the Iraqis but I don’t recall any casualties at IBM.
Into this world comes Kevin Daum’s “ROAR! Get Heard in the Sales and Marketing Jungle – A Business Fable” – a title as cumbersome as the data in a weekly sales-funnel report. But I protest too much. When it comes to business books, it’s a wide open field. Like Daum, some authors are hooked on allegories (“Getting Naked – A Business Fable” and “Training Camp – A Fable About Excellence”), others with animals (“Fish!” about improving business morale), Monday (“Monday Morning Motivation” and “Thank God It's Monday”) and the miniscule (“The Little Big Things” and “The Power of Small”).
ROAR!’s framework is a familiar one to the business student. It ties a company’s value proposition (a statement of benefits, costs and value that an organization can deliver to customers) to what differentiates it. Once done, these messages are used in every communications and sales tool available.
Coupled with this, the company’s salespeople learn how to deal with the four types of buyers. Here, Daum reaches mightily for his conceptual hook. “Taken from the Jewish Passover Seder,” he writes, “this identification of persuasion patterns has effectively communicated history and heritage for millennia.” Moving quickly to the African savannah, he calls it the ROAR method – recognizing the type of buyer, observing their perspective, acknowledging their concerns, and resolving needs.
Lenny, the wise Hasidic practitioner of ROAR! (based on the real-life businessman Len Openheimer), tutors his Gentile friend and eager pupil Ryan through a series of luncheon meetings in New York restaurants. These settings are easily the most original conceit of the book. But the narrative is a bit of a shudden (Yiddish for “big mess”) of leonine acronyms, kosher cuisine, and marketing lingo throughout.
As usual with business self-help literature, following the author’s advice will lead the reader to become a success – the marketplace is that simple. Not really. Daum is an entrepreneur. Like any good businessman, he has identified our collective commercial pain and constructed a simple panacea to cure it. But businesses fail far more frequently than they succeed regardless of the medicine, just as books do.
Yet Daum’s tone is as warm as a potato latke, and this is what saves ROAR! There are even full descriptions in the back pages of the actual restaurants Lenny and Ryan visit. And let’s face it – in our miserable economy any word of advice from the ancients can’t be all that bad.
Sales literature has been dominated by such writers as Zig Ziglar, Og Mandino and even Dale Carnegie. Daum and his co-writer Daniel A. Turner may not be part of that circle yet, but they’re not pitching blue foam footballs either.
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Reviewer Robert Nersesian has spent his career in public relations, working for or advising Fortune 500 companies. He is currently president of the consulting firm Public Advocacy Associates, LLC.