Marketing for Rainmakers: 52 Rules of Engagement to Attract and Retain Customers for Life

by Phil Fragasso

Book Overview

You are a successful entrepreneur with a brain for business, but you're indecisive about marketing and need a guide that will help your company distinguish itself, inspire customer loyalty and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0470247533
• ISBN13: 9780470247532
• Release Date: July 2008
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.9" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Educational, yet entertaining. Easy to read, digest, and implement

Marketing For Rainmakers is a great book for both experienced and novice marketers alike. For one who has been in the marketing business for years, the book helps you approach known techniques from a different perspective. And for those new to marketing, Phil uses a formula in each chapter to make the book easy to understand, digest and most importantly- implement. He first introduces a concept, then illustrates the concept and how it relates to marketing, and finally gives real life examples of how you can implement the concept introduced immediately into your business. I liked the format of the book, which is divided into 52 short chapters, full of colorful examples of the author's points delivered in a straight forward, yet humorous style. My recommendation would be to read the book through once to get a general overview to being a Rainmaker marketer. But then, keep the book at your desk and focus on implementing a concept in a chapter each week (book is conveniently has 52 chapters or 52 Rules of Engagement). Phil's book will help you see that there are marketing lessons to be learned all around you that can be applied to your specific industry. The book will help you get in the frame of mind to look at things in ways that your competition traditionally hasn't, and then act with this new-found insight and perspective. And while reading this book, you'll not only get educated, you'll also be entertained.

Who knew business education could be so entertaining

I've read my share of business and marketing books, and this one is a great, fast read. So much more entertaining than the usual dry business books cluttering everyone's office shelves. The concepts within are mostly common sense, but unfortunately they are often not so common in the workplace. He reminds us of them with a lot of humor and great real world examples. I think if a marketing exec actually followed the rules outlined in this book, his or her department and company would be a really great place in which to work.

Get your highlighter and stickies out!

My book is covered with little sticky tabs and yellow highlights highlighting some great how-to: 'storyboard' your marketing plan, incorporate knowledge-added marketing, build a sales playbook, stick your marketing message, and more. So many marketing books are fluff. Fragasso's is practical, actionable, and easy to read. Funny, too! As someone who inhales marketing books, this is one of the best I've seen in a while.

For small-business owners as well as employees of large organizations

"Marketing is like sex. Not male sex, mind you, but rather female sex ... (for females), good sex is indeed great, but bad sex is somewhere on the spectrum between doing laundry and having a root canal." One of the many illuminating points Phil Fragasso makes in this book is that like sex, good marketing "elicits wows, while bad--or even mediocre--marketing elicits yawns." "Marketing for Rainmakers" is an indispensable guide to wowing your customers and to attracting and retaining them. Whether you run your own graphic design or other professional services firm, are an independent contractor, or you work for a larger organization, "Marketing for Rainmakers" should be an essential reference in your library. It'll teach you how to make your customers fall in love with you, and I believe will help you make more money as well.

Practical, fun and insightful

There are a lot of marketing books out there, and I've read or glanced through the majority of them. The key problem with most marketing books, though, is that they take one good idea and milk it for 300 pages. What I liked about this book is the breadth and variety of ideas. While not every single one of the 52 Rules of Engagement provides a breakthrough insight, they are consistently valuable and uniformly easy to put into action. If you're looking for a book to tell you how to run an ad campaign or use web marketing, this is not the book for you. It's not a how-to-do book; rather it's a how-to-think book. How to think like a marketer and increase your rainmaking skills. The book is clearly aimed at professionals and independents, but I think it has a lot of application for corporate-based marketers as well. Early on in the book, Fragasso stresses that neither marketing or rainmaking are God-given talents -- and his book succeeds at increasing the reader's skill level at both.