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Book Review: Selling The Invisible

Written by: Jay Hamilton-Roth

Article Overview: Selling The Invisible is packed with tips and insights on how to market your business services. Harry Beckwith claims that most marketing advice is based on a product marketing model, most of which doesn’t apply to service businesses.

Book Review: Selling The Invisible

Selling The Invisible is packed with tips and insights on how to market your business services. Harry Beckwith claims that most marketing advice is based on a product marketing model, most of which doesn’t apply to service businesses.

He makes each point in just a few paragraphs, which makes this book easy to grab when you only have a few minutes for marketing inspiration.

His key points include:

• Before marketing your service, make it great.

• Don’t just create what the market needs or wants. Create what it would love.
• Survey people by phone.
• Don’t do focus groups.
• Marketing is not a department. It’s your business.
• Every act is a marketing act. Make every person a marketing person.
• If you’re selling a service, you’re selling a relationship.
• Your real competitor is often your customer (either they do it themself or they don’t believe anyone can do it).
• Marginal tactics executed passionately almost always will outperform brilliant tactics executed marginally.
• Think dumb. Smart people are experts at squashing good ideas.
• Take advantage of the Recency Effect. Follow up brilliantly.
• Forget looking like the superior choice. Make yourself an excellent choice. Then eliminate anything that might make you a bad choice.
• To broaden your appeal, narrow your position.
• Choose a position that will reposition your competitors; then move back toward the middle to cinch the sale.
• Generic names encourage generic business.
• Your first competitor is indifference.
• Saying many things usually communicates nothing.
• After you say one thing, repeat it again and again.

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Article Tags: business services, competitor, few minutes, focus groups, generic business, generic names, harry beckwith, indifference, inspiration, li li, many things, marketing person, marketing your service, paragraphs, person li, product marketing, recency effect, rsquo, service businesses, ul



Related Forum Posts
Re: Top 50 Lists - Hi Evan, How about "Top 50": -Inventor Blogs To Watch -Franchising Blogs To Watch -Business Book Review Blogs -Women Entrepreneur Blogs -Young Entrepreneur Blogs
My reading log - Hi OmnivoreInk, Before starting my business, I read the following books as research: -"The Art of the Start" by Guy Kawasaki -"The AdSense Code" by Joel Comm -"Don't Think Pink" and "Mind Your X's and Y's" by Lisa Johnson And since then I've continued my "research" by reading (in this order): -"Technical Tennis" by Rod Cross -"For One More Day" by Mitch Albom -"The Twits" by Roald Dahl -"Little Black Book of Connections" by Jeffrey Gitomer -"The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne -"The Profitable Retailer" by Doug Fleener -"Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell -"Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude" by Jeffrey Gitomer -"The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" by C.S. Lewis -"Little Green Book of Getting Your Way" by Jeffrey Gitomer -"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" by J.K. Rowling And I'm currently reading and am in the process of finishing the following: -"There's No Such Thing as Public Speaking" by Jeanette and Roy Henderson -"The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell -"The Book of Tells" by Peter Collett -"Little Red Book of Sales Answers" by Jeffrey Gitomer -"Chocolates on the Pillow Aren't Enough: Reinventing The Customer Experience" by Jonathan M. Tisch -"The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity" by Julia Cameron -"The Inner Game of Tennis" by Timothy Gallwey
Re: Significance of Review Sites - Exactly! Review sites are very helpful for providing better understanding to a product or service.
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
Re: Kevin's Case Study #10 - When to become an entrepreneur? - When the bug bite you. A lot of successful entrepreneurs started in their teens or at school. Selling sweets to fellow students or lemonade to firends in the neighbourhood.


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