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

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.

Reviews

The author of Selling the Invisible tries to top that book's bestselling success with this breezy collection of one- to two-page friendly lecturettes on how to keep your business profitable. He might just do so, as it's difficult to imagine a book better suited in format to harried executives: they could gulp down the entire volume over the course of a single flight. Beckwith has somehow also managed to take a format where so many authors have tried and failed, and written a useful, direct and even at times inspiring book. In this age of information overload, Beckwith pulls some valuable lessons out of the bygone days of the 1970s, when, he says, consumers had infinitely fewer products and services to choose from, but seemed generally happier. Other valuable lessons for today's hard-charging businessperson include: "Hard sales lose business," "No superlatives" and, in order to understand how to run a successful business, "Study Starbucks." Beckwith is even able to take a simple thing like a name-e.g., Kinko's-and show how that chain was able, through its name (although the ubiquity of its open all-day-and-night locations didn't hurt), to crush the competition, whose names all sounded alike (e.g., InstyPrint, SpeedyPrint, etc.). Pocket-sized and packed with nuggets of wisdom, this is a rare winner in a glutted field.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In Beckwith's business best-seller, Selling the Invisible (1997), he demonstrated how marketing service-oriented businesses requires a different strategy than marketing traditional products. He uses the same format here to teach his principles of business planning and the fine art of the soft sell. The book consists of several hundred brief lessons in which Beckwith uses the success or failure of well-known companies to illustrate his points. Each one concludes with an aphorism in boldface that summarizes the lesson in a nutshell. In a helpful section on picking your company name, he notes that people tend to shorten names anyway and recommends starting off with a short, easily pronounceable yet edgy name. While he recommends having experts on board, he warns, "We disdain the person who speaks with too much authority. We cherish humility, even in people we suspect may be brilliant." Find a common way to communicate your uncommon skill. These lessons make for great inspiration, better left on your desk to flip through at random rather than read straight through. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

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