What Clients Love: A Field Guide to Growing Your Business - Hardcover

Beckwith, Harry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446527556 ISBN 13: 9780446527552

Publisher: Business Plus, 2003

Synopsis

Harry Beckwith is the author of Selling the Invisible and The Invisible Touch, both marketing classics. Now he applies his unparalleled clarity, insight, humor, and expertise to a new age of mass communication and mass confusion. What Clients Love will help you stand out from the crowd-and sell anything to anyone. From making a pitch to building a brand, from designing a logo to closing a sale, this is a field guide to take with you to the front lines of today's business battles. Filled with real tales of success and failure, it shows you how to: * Fly a Jefferson Airplane. Everyone knows there's a Jefferson Monument, but a Jefferson Airplane? A brilliant, attention-grabbing name often includes the unexpected and the absurd. * Strike with a Velvet Sledgehammer. It's not a hard sell. It's not exactly soft. Selling well means finding the fine line between modesty and bragging, and driving the message home. * Speak to the Frenchman on the Street. A French mathematician believed that no theory was complete until you could explain it to the first person you meet on the street. Marketers, ecoutez! * Dress Julia Roberts. Why one scene from Pretty Woman can enlighten you more than a full year of study at a top business school. What Clients Love will help you get focused, stay focused, and follow the essential rules to success-by doing the little things right and the big things even better.

About this title

Review:

In What Clients Love, marketing maven Harry Beckwith offers valuable lessons about capturing and keeping clients. (As Beckwith puts it, "Competence gets firms into the game that relationships win.") Using snappy examples from Absolut Vodka, Kinko’s, Starbucks, and Ian Schrager’s boutique hotels, he organizes his advice by describing four significant social trends that shape client needs and loyalty. Beckwith’s strategies for coping with information overload focus on getting to the point--using a shorter sell and fewer superlatives. He makes a clever and convincing case for giving both testimonials and blurbs the death penalty. He details the decline of client trust with a plan to eliminate cold calls, dress for success, and a spot-on critique of PowerPoint ("Lincoln had no slides at Gettysburg.") Other chapters explore the limits of the Internet and offer nongimmicky ideas about creating a brand, including 20 questions for choosing a name for your business.

Beckwith’s advice is fresh, funny, and strategic. He is a master of anecdote and metaphor whose examples range from television’s Sex and the City to nihilistic philosopher Nietzsche. Yet the book’s clarity is sometimes undermined by its too clever formatting. It's best to enjoy its wisdom one chapter at a time, over coffee. Consider it the caffeine in your cup. --Barbara Mackoff

About the Author:

Harry Beckwith is a frequent guest lecturer for many national corporations, including ABC, Inc., BellSouth Corporation, Norwest Corporation, and Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc., among others. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

About this edition

• Publisher: Business Plus
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0446527556
• ISBN 13: 9780446527552
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304