Marketing disguised as Sales or viceversa

In February 2010, two and a half years ago, I wrote on Amazon a review on the the book "Marketing Made Easy" by Kevin Epstein. Here is the text:

Entrepreneurial companies, in need of immediate revenues, have a down to earth attitude. Marketing makes leads, leads make customers, customers bring revenues. The entire focus of the is how to do marketing to get money in the shortest time possible. This is not a metaphor. This is a formula: If a customer prospect may buy a $1,000 and the marketeer or sales person has $50 an hour s/he must spend a maximum of 10 hours to have at least 50% margin profit per person. And so on. How many leads we need to close 4 customers? These are classical sales questions, and are answered in this marketing book. Leads collection relevant to a given product are very specific. In the last years, pioneered by Google and Yahoo, these techniques can identify, from the click-through patterns of a visitor, what interest they have, and sending them focused proposals. Anyone is seeing this on Amazon. They propose products you searched for before, the moment you land on the home page. The book touches this subject on page 68 to 71, but on a next edition, the content can be updated.

The book has a lively way to rephrase common sense advise, like "watch the hands, not mouth" (translation "read the body language"), "watch cause" (translation "is the customer ready to buy? Why") or my favorite "Incrementalism" (Translation: don't start from scratch: take all competitor's customer presentations you know of, hire their sales people and call into their accounts")

Is this practical? You bet! Is it original? Yes here, no there. Is it useful? Yes, Yes, Yes. Is it a good book? Yes if you are an entrepreneur and no wonder the book is published by the Entrepreneur Magazine press. Is this boring? Hell, no. An easy and optimistic read.

I just realize Kevin talked (1) the language of  "customer acquisition" , described in another article here, Tristan Kromer's Customer Development and User Experience or (2) personalized offers to specific customers and not to an average dummy customer as in A/B testing , long before it started to reach mainstream.

By the way Kevin's  book is available for free borrowing for Amazon Prime customers