I’m reading a good book called Zero to One, written by Peter Thiel, one the guys who founded PayPal. My life was changed by that app – my wife would agree.

Peter includes a chapter on sales which looks like it’s written for people in business who don’t understand sales – to the extent that in their business sales does not exist.

For instance:

“The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.”

Wow! A very elegant statement of a phenomenon that, after many years in sales, I continue to run into.

“The engineer’s grail is a product great enough that “it sells itself.” But anyone who would actually say this about a real product must be lying: either he’s delusional (lying to himself) or he’s selling something (and thereby contradicting himself).”

Engineering companies hate to admit they have salespeople. A consultant friend of mine in Germany has a large contract to help ease a large construction company into the idea that they should build a sales department. They realized this after too many competing companies taking business from them.

I was glad to see Meryl Streep take away an Oscar for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady.” She is wonderful at turning herself into a totally plausible character such as Thatcher, and a while back, Julia Child.

People were not so thrilled about the Thatcher film itself. A bit thin, and too much emphasis on Mrs. Thatcher’s health issues in later life. It must be tough for the team that wrote, produced and directed the film, when your leading lady does an Oscar performance but reviewers don’t think that your work cut it.

It’s tough to take criticism, no one likes it. My book, Sales Automation Done Right has never gone mainstream, but it has gathered some enthusiastic support and is being used as a college-level text. Before I published, I got a few early positive comments for it which are referenced on the outer cover of the book.

The thing is, whenever I Google “sales automation done right” I can only come up with one review by someone named Tab. This is how I felt when I read it:

Tab: All I can say is wow.