Amazon.com
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
From Publishers Weekly
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.
From Booklist
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
Book Description
Today's business tactics demand unique marketing plans that are practical and down-to-earth. Effective marketers know how to be clear, concise, and cut to the close. In WHAT CLIENTS LOVE, readers will learn how to pinpoint a company's position, define a brand and manage it so that it has full and overwhelming impact, and harness the changes that keep one's clients not only happy, but thrilled and grateful. In WHAT CLIENTS LOVE, Harry Beckwith reveals the four significant social changes that shape and accomplish what clients really love and need.
Download Description
In WHAT CLIENTS LOVE, Harry Beckwith once again discusses effective business tactics with the practical, down-to-earth style that has made him a bestselling author and trusted marketing expert.Beckwith explains the sheer simplicity of a marketing plan-how to find your company's position, how to define a brand, and how to manage that brand so it has its full and overwhelming impact. With sections such as "Thinking and Planning," "Communicating," and "Serving the Client," Beckwith shows how effective marketers need to be brief, succinct and "cut to the close." WHAT CLIENTS LOVE also reveals the very nature of a service-and why the phrase "pushing the product" itself begins to suggest why this more aggressive approach fails, since you cannot ""push" a relationship, as people know from their failed attempts to do so in non-business relationships.
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.
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