The book for this review is entitled How to Wow, Proven Strategies for Presenting Your Ideas, Persuading Your Audience, and Perfecting Your Image. It’s written by Francis Cole Jones.

This is a book written for today, for a world where you may have only a few seconds to make your case, pitch your product or secure that job.

Jones opens the book with a quick little bit asking the question: how often you have left an interview, a meeting, a presentation, or an audition thinking that you nailed it – only to discover you didn’t get the job, the client, the account, the funding, or the part?

She spends the rest of the book giving you tools to ensure that that doesn’t happen to you.  These tools are well thought out, succinct, and well written.

What about you?

Are you ready for that elevator ride with your CEO?

How about that impromptu presentation for the board?

Whatever your area of specialty, you need to be better at positively presenting your case, making the right first impression, and communicating the message you really want to communicate.

This book is a good tool to help in all those departments.  My favorite part of the book was actually chapter one, which is called Don’t Leave Home Without Them,”the nonnegotiable general principles”.  In this chapter, Jones provides some of the best summarized tips for good communication and persuasion I have ever seen collected in one place.

She follows this chapter up with details on how to make the most out of one-on-one encounters, how to maximize your meetings, how to ace job interviews without the stress and turmoil, the key to giving speeches that bring people to their feet and move them to action, and an entire chapter on creating powerful PowerPoints.

Each of these chapters is a seminar in and of itself, but Jones also includes chapters on how to put things in writing in a way that puts your best foot forward, making the most of social interactions (and, might I add, not completely blowing it during social interactions), and the fine points of what she calls “verbal finesse” (how to answer questions and how to handle question and answer periods after you speak).

If I were to levy any criticism of the book, it would be that it spends a lot of time on things that seem like basic principals to me — but based on my interactions with other human beings, they are basic principals that are not widely known.

The most useful function of the book is the handy bullet point summary at the end of each chapter.  Truly, if you don’t have time to read, buy the book and photocopy the bullet points at the very least.  If you employ at least half of them,  I guarantee they will change your quality of life.

This book gets my recommendation.

Value-Based Fees, subtitled “How to Charge – And Get – What You’re Worth, A Guide for Serious Consultants” is a veritable treasure map that leads to other treasure maps.

It’s actually difficult to overstate how much great information is contained between the covers of Alan Weiss’ book.

Value Based Fees was first published in 2002, and it quickly became the top book for consultants who needed to figure out how much they should charge their clients for their services.

Weiss has revised this book in this new edition, and he shows how consulting fees are really based on only two things: The value provided in the perception

of the buyer, and the intent of the buyer and the consultant to act ethically. While this sounds like a small distinction, it carries the weight of a $1M idea. The problem, Weiss postulates, is that most consultants just don’t understand that the perception of value is the basis of the fee, or that it is necessary for the consultant to articulate the importance of their advice into long-term gains for the client (Again, in the client’s perception).

Another problem that Weiss identifies is the fact that consultants often simply don’t have the courage nor the actual belief that support the high value they

deliver to clients, and as a result they end up reducing their fees to a level that reflects the consultant’s own low self-esteem.

In the end, according to Weiss, consultants are the reason for their own low incomes.

This book aims to change that phenomenon.

The book is filled with stories of successful consultants, and demonstrates in concrete ways how you can educate your clients about the value you’re

rendering, and, more importantly, how you can command high fees that are commensurate with the value you render.

The book is filled with step by step guidance, and proven systems for establishing the value of your services and getting clients to pay for that value. This is a hands on book with hands on advice including:

• Current information on ethical issues.
• Guidance on making consulting scalable.
• Key formulas for today’s marketplace.
• New chapters on building wealth and the implication of technology fees.

This book clearly explains how to charge exactly what you’re worth and get that price, giving you not theories, but practical advice that will help improve your practice and your income immediately.

Don’t be deceived by the book’s title or subject matter.  The ideas set forth in this book are not for consultants only, but for anyone who needs to establish and get a higher value for the services or products that they render to their customers and clients.

If you are in any kind of business at all, and even if you are an employee, the ideas, tools, and tactics in this book can revolutionize your life and multiply your income.  Let those with eyes and ears see and hear.  Highly recommended.

…but it can be profitable.

I recently read a great book on marketing that takes a slightly different turn than my usual reading.

I’m recommending the book to you.

It’s called Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and is written by Shel Horowitz and Jay Conrad Levinson.

I think the book’s main virtue (aside from being well-reasoned and well-written) is demonstrating the work we do as business owners and entrepreneurs is important. Not only in an economic sense, but in other ways as well.

In the book, Shel does a great job of marrying the ethics and pragmatics of business, and showing us that the two are inextricably linked. These ethical, spiritual viewpoints are important as determiners of the paradigm from which we operate as business people.

(As an aside: the section on copywriting is brilliant, a great distillation of timeless truth, presented in a fresh new way. I’ll be discussing these ideas in an upcoming issue of my soon-to-be-launched print newsletter for copywriters.)

Historically, there have been two disparate camps in the Western world. One one hand: the “Ayn Rand style” of entrepreneur, out primarily to make money. On the other hand: the spiritual-socially-conscious people, who have tended to paint “big business” primarily as robber-barons.

There is a third way, and it is masterfully articulated in this book.

And while I don’t agree with everything in the book, I have no hesitation in recommending it.

Read Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, and be encouraged. The work you’re doing is more important than you may think.

In which I point you to the articles you may have missed this week…

Freebie Friday: The Writer’s Edition

The Customer Is NOT Always Right

Deciding Who You WON’T Sell To

Articles published here this week.

Relentless Rules That Make Cash Registers Ring

Ray Edwards Tuesday Tips

Always Make an Offer

Always Have a Ticking Clock

Ray Edwards Freebie Friday

Cool free stuff you can use. This week: tutorials and such.

Prepare breakfast for the week in 5 minutes.

Consolidate all your email accounts.

Tech types: check out Dave Winer (the “proto blogger”) and his new “minimal blogging tool”.

Build websites in 60 seconds using your iPhone or iPad.

Schedule meetings without back-and-forth emails or “phone tag” – automatically.

Every Tuesday I’m supplying interesting and useful links (“tips”) to other sites, articles and resources.

Action Machine. Hands-down the most powerful tool I use that helps me get more done.

Simple way to replace your income online. Yeah, I know it’s cheesy-sounding, but it works and it’s 100% honest, ethical, and do-able.

Fotolia allows you to easily use royalty-free photos for as little as a few cents each.

How to get over 90,000 readers with one headline.

An online event management tool so cool you’ll want to have an event just so you can use it.

Cool free stuff you can use.

Dropbox. A free online hard drive you can share and access from anywhere.

Google Web Apps. Google helps you be more productive with cool web applications.

Open Office. It’s like Microsoft Office, but it’s not made by Microsoft and it’s, well, free.

Evernote. My absolute favorite app that defies description – but I’ll try: your new omnipresent, universal, non-corporeal notebook. Yep, can’t describe it. Try it. You’ll understand.

LastPass. The last password you will ever need. Better than 1Password or Roboform.

I’m trying something new – every Tuesday supplying interesting and useful links (“tips”) to other sites, articles and resources.

I’m pretty good at finding cool stuff.

Let me know what you think. If you like it, I’ll keep it up each week.

Increase Your Twitter Following by Improving Your Timing.

Keith Ferrazzi Offers Free Guides for Better Relationships.

The Simplest Way to Spread Knowledge.

How to Record a Video Interview in Eight Steps.

A Better Filing System for Public Speakers (and Writers.)