34 Sugar Hill Road Killingworth, CT 06419 Voice: 860.663.0552 Fax: 860.663.0553

By William F. Zachmann, President, Canopus Research Monday, June 21, 1999, for CompuServe Computing

One of the more interesting experiences of my life came in the late 1960s and early 1970s when I took my first "real" job at what was then the First National Bank of Boston in what was then called "EDP [electronic data processing] Planning" within the "Systems Research" department. My primary responsibilities included medium- to long-range planning and acquisition of the hardware and software needed for FNB Boston's computer center. This also included managing contact with all the sales people for the hardware and software vendors that sold to the bank.

One of the sales people I especially enjoyed working with was a fellow who joined as the junior member of the IBM team responsible for sales to FNB Boston (IBM had at least three or four people dedicated full-time to our account at the time). I got to know him quite well on a personal as well as on a professional basis.

What absolutely fascinated me about this fellow was that despite his having just graduated from Harvard Business School with a concentration in marketing, the real sources of his "savvy" about selling came from a collection of how-to-sell books from the 1950s. His Harvard Business School professors of marketing (several of whom I happened also to know personally) were of little practical use to him. He turned, instead, to sources like Frank Bettger's "How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling," Willie Gayle's "Power Selling," Charles B. Roth's "Secrets of Closing Sales" (all three published by Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey), and John M. Wilson's (formerly vice president, sales, The National Cash Register Company) "Open the Mind and Close the Sale" (McGraw Hill, New York, 1953) for practical wisdom about how to handle a real sales situation.

That was an enduring lesson for me. Reading the books this fellow used for his guides as a new IBM salesman, I realized that they incorporated an astonishing range of practical wisdom totally foreign to the academic environment, albeit with an intended practical emphasis, so familiar to me from the Harvard Business School of the late 1960s. The key lesson I learned is that it is not unusual for the greatest practical wisdom related to some real world context to have been wholly overlooked by the most respected, "official" sources of supposed knowledge about it.

Rick Chapman's book is by no means of the genre of those '40s and '50s era how-to-sell books. Like them, however, it encapsulates a rich corpus of practical, usable wisdom, not about how it is supposed to work according to some academic theory but, rather, about how it really works. I have never seen anything else that comes close to providing such a complete, well-rounded, practically useful and usable account of what is really involved in marketing and selling software. The Product Marketing Handbook for Software" (Third Edition) really "covers the waterfront" from basic product positioning, pricing and naming, through PR promotion, to the latest options in electronic marketing.

More than just an excellent "how to" book on software marketing, Rick's book provides the best single source I have seen yet for a concise, practical account of the real world dynamics of public relations, promotion, and distribution of software. The Product Marketing Handbook for Software is actually quite an underground sleeper success already. It richly deserves, however, far wider readership and appreciation than it has achieved to date.

Rick and his colleagues have created a real gem of a book totally packed with useful, practical information and more than a little genuine wisdom about how it really works. This latest edition will, I think, be the one to catapult the book out of what is still at least relative obscurity into the much wider field of awareness that it truly merits. I will venture to predict that more than a few entrepreneurial software developers will, in the future, make their fortunes at least in part by heeding its advice. Buy it! Read it! If you are in any way interested in software marketing, you will certainly be glad you did.

Home    About   Details   Contact   Press   Info

34 Sugar Hill Road Killingworth, CT 06419 Voice: 860.663.0552 Fax: 860.663.0553

Copyright Aegis Resources, 2007. All rights reserved