OUTMARKET THE COMPETITION

Investor and entrepreneur Doyle offers both an overview of the world of sales and marketing and a series of in-depth strategies for mastering that world.

Doyle stresses that breaking sales plateaus and growing businesses don’t require any special secret approach. “It requires only that we collect the tools all around us—the tools that every marketer has access to—and deploy them in concert.” In the modern concept of marketing, he notes, people are often told they should be “driven by data.” That information can often seem trivial or “not even statistically significant,” resulting in new laws of marketing that weren’t known to earlier generations. In order to help understand this rapidly changing world, Doyle has developed what he calls the Five-Tactic Marketing Framework. This framework is designed to enhance brand and performance marketing, create what he calls a “Lifetime Value Framework” (using profitability metrics to determine marketing budget instead of a fixed number), and crunch the numbers to determine the allowable costs of industry leads. Doyle returns often to the importance of branding and outreach, noting that branded products tend to sell 20-30% more than generic ones even when the ingredients or services are essentially the same. Doyle’s expertise is evident on every page of his book—that expertise is underscored by graphs, charts, and a large amount of research. His willingness to dig deep into the technical details of marketing might make this volume daunting for beginners, although his insistence that marketing has entered a new world (thanks to things like social media and AI) is dented a bit by the fact that much of his advice—learn about your customers, search out promising leads, emphasize the value of communication, etc.—is fairly commonplace. Even so, marketing wonks will find much of value here.

A readable though advanced schematic for more effective sales and marketing.