Breezy 'What Clients Love' offers tips for marketing success
There's timeless wisdom in Harry Beckwith's book "What Clients Love: A Field Guide to Growing Your Business," a compendium of solid marketing advice written in refreshingly short vignettes.
The author's Stanford degree and successful marketing consulting firm confirm he has the chops for this kind of prescriptive yet compelling format.
The author churns out recommendations for marketing success backed by research, with catchy headlines such as "Finding the White Hot Center," which urges us to find what we now call "influencers" to guide our way. In "Think Pterodactyls and Typhoons," he emphasizes the attraction we have to weird words and phrases (like "Google").
He writes in a breezy style that can hold the attention of a digital native, and each chapter brims with truisms that are never cliché.
"Some key answers to your marketing questions are not where you may think," Beckwith writes. With that, he advises us to move past the business section of the bookstore or library with books about "clients" and move on to literature, where we find classics about people.
A key to growing a business is understanding people, he writes, and novels are what clients love. "To understand Business, check Literature," he says. More than anything, people love stories, so get good at telling stories.
Elsewhere, the author cites the power of first impressions and measures them not in minutes but in seconds. What do the best salespeople sell? First, themselves. In one pithy chap-lette, (too small to be a chapter, bigger than a paragraph), he quotes the Supremes who sang, "You can't hurry love. You just have to wait." Like love, it takes time to build the relationships that help build our businesses.
Hard selling, he writes, violates this rule, plowing through boundaries and scaring prospective clients away.
Later in the book, Beckwith advises you to "Sell Like You Date," emphasizing that asking a stranger to have a relationship before you get to know each other will result in a cold shoulder. "Good marketing eliminates cold calls," he writes.
The power of a brand is woven throughout the book, including some very basic but repeatable mantras, like never bad-mouth the competition or a past client. In fact, even the concept of a mantra gets a mention in this book, and despite getting a bad rap, he writes, "mantras work."
Handwritten thank-you notes, using someone's name and the power of a warm welcome are all reminders that small things can make a very big difference in our businesses and our lives.
In the end, at the risk of being a plot-spoiler, the author says what clients love the most is - comfort. It turns out that being comfortable in your own skin, and making others feel comfortable in theirs, is the ultimate in client service.
Vickie Austin is president & CEO of the Wheaton Chamber of Commerce. Austin is the author of "Circles of Gold: Honoring Your Network for Business & Career Success." She can be reached at president@wheatonchamber.com.