What Clients Love: A Field Guide to Growing Your Business

As a business owner, I've never allowed myself to think. (didn't want to recreate the wheel, ya know.) I read to glean ideas and apply them where I think they might fit. Wrong, Wrong, WRONG!!! He emphasizes how important "my" clients are and that I know better than anybody else what my clients love. It took WHAT CLIENTS LOVE to get me to act on that knowledge. My initiative has grown exponentially, because of this book. Bet my business will mirror my ambition now!His style is not the academic, "I-know-best, nose-up-in-the-air" pontification. He shares his painful bombs, and near-successes too(How he grew!!) His honesty is refreshing and helpful. This is my first subject from Mr. Beckwith. It will not be the last.

This book is short, sweet, to the point, and reads like a daily devotional book. I plan on using at for discussion groups at work to get non-marketers to understand how to make customers happy. The book is written in a clear, concise, but extraordinarily interesting manner than lends itself to discussion and implementation. Each section contains at least one example of each point - and this is stuff you are going to remember. Many books in this market are pure fluff - you can't remember a darn thing they said two hours after you put the book down. Not so with "What Clients Love."Highly recommend for those whose business depends on developing business and keeping customers happy. Whether selling hardcore tangible products or professional services, this book should be on your required reading list. Truly transformational.

This "field guide" provides innovative and yet practical and prudent advice on what, in Beckwith's opinion, must be done to attract, reward, and sustain the loyalty of those to whom one sells...whatever that product, service, or idea may be. Consumers now experience an information, indeed a sensory overload of marketing messages which makes differentiation even more difficult now than ever before. Beckwith explains how to penetrate such clutter.After identifying and then analyzing in detail four "Key Trends," he challenges dozens of widely held beliefs about effective marketing which, in his judgment, have been invalidated by those trends. For example: * "Word-of-mouth advertising has become the world's most overrated form of marketing." Why? "Our mobility propels us away from [old networks through which to process word-of-mouth communications] and into new cities where everyone seems to come from somewhere else."* "Cold calls leave people cold." Why? "People feel most comfortable with people they know -- and mistrust ones they've never heard of. You must get known [to them prior to initial contact]."* "It is not what you say; it is what people hear. It is not what you communicate; it's what gets communicated." Why? "You tell your story with words, perhaps, but words are only symbols....Written words, in other words, are just symbols of symbols."* "Clients do not buy solutions." Why? Numerous research studies indicate that "responsiveness to phone calls" and "sincere interest in developing a relationship" ranked higher in importance than "technical skill" -- the ability to devise solutions. According to Beckwith, "It isn't the better solution that clients value. It's the simple act of listening itself. We value it because of how we feel. It makes us feel important." He suggests an abundance of strategies and tactics by which to achieve any organization's desired objectives, given the aforementioned trends which continue to create an especially volatile, increasingly ferocious competitive marketplace. For example, how to cope with "Option and Information Overload" (pages 45-96) and how to accommodate "The [Clients'] Wish to Connect" (pages 195-242). Moreover, in the final section of his book, Beckwith answers the question "Why do some people and businesses thrive?" He includes an especially relevant quotation from David Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations:"In this world, the optimists have it., not because they are always right, but because they are positive. Even when they are wrong they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement, and success. Educated, eye-open optimism pays."Beckwith urges his reader to build "something that fills you with passion, and then spread its flames into every corner of your business....Triumph, then, belongs to those who believe...[to those who take] the path which runs along the cliff -- that one, the one without any guardrails." By doing so, he assures his reader, she or he will

When I write about practice managment, I tell acupuncturists to get to know Harry Beckwith. He's the ultimate practice management guru.But Beckwith's books have nothing to do with medicine! How could he help there?Beckwith writes about SERVICE marketing. Most of the practice management literature hasn't caught on. You're selling a service. Not a product.Even now, your competition is stiff. Do you know who Harry says is your biggest competition? It's not who you think!Your biggest competetion is the customer. If they don't think they need you... if they can do it themselves... if they find a way around you... you lose. And so do they, because they really DO need you. You've just got to prove it to them.How could reading this book help your business? Harry's books contain hundreds of small sections... each with a story or market research study, some discussion, and a moral-of-the-story at the end. It's easy to digest these books in pieces.Thank goodness (and thank Harry) that he didn't try to come up with one of those foolish 7 step plans... life's too fluid and organic. It can't be reduced to a set of rules.Each piece stimulates ideas. You may slap your forehead more than once as you realize some of the mistakes you're making. Harry will help you think better.I've read "Selling the Invisible," and "What Clients Love." I'm going to re-read them both. My Dad borrowed the second one... I may have to buy it again!

Or so he tells us in the intro to his third marketing book.While on a tour for the first book,he did not follow his own advice---it's the small things that save us(he mispronounced the ceo's name at a speech for his company); interjected the negative(talked to a group about his divorce);and not believing in his heart of hearts(where it really counts)his advice that it's all about relationships and emotion.Although in the intro to the book,he follows his own advice that a little humility with a client(or a reader) generates lots of good will.But if you sell services---and Beckwith argues that most of us now do---his latest is for you.The book is divided into a couple of hundred chapters,each just a page or two long.And he hammers home his advice:be specific and concrete in describing what you do;find the transcendent meaning of what you do(for me,I no longer pratice employment law but help clients manage an employment matter before the matter manages them);and make sure that evreything you say,do,wear,creates the expectation that you are reliable,skilled,and trustworthy.The book arms you with both attitude and tactics:drop the idea of a "mission" or that you sell "solutions"---they are so 1990s;try contridictions like Omaha Surfing(or Beckwith Bombs and 5 stars come to think of it);and value your client's time.The book has so much jammed in it that it's like chocolate cake---almost too rich.He wraps up with a valuable appendix of checklists but with even more valuable advice:be passionate about what you do and your clients will be passionate about you.