What Clients Love: A Field Guide to Growing Your Business

Posted on May 14, 2008 - Filed Under Hardcover |

Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0446527556
Manufacturer: Business Plus
Average Customer Review: (From 32 total reviews)
List Price: ~~$21.95~~
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Editorial Reviews

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

Product Description:
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

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.

Customer Reviews

Refreshing by Julie A. Loomis
What a refreshing and eye-opening book. This book highlights what is truly important in business-pleasing your customers. It will help you to sift through the everyday marketing propaganda and get down to what you need to do to make your clients happy-TODAY.

Insightful by M. Tharp
This is the most insightful and analytical book about business I have ever read. You don’t need to be an MBA to understand and benefit from the well-thought-out and plainly presented message. Anyone who sells goods or services to the public will benefit greatly from this cogent take on the nuts and bolts behind pleasing clients.

A real joy on multiple levels by John Chancellor
I first read this book shortly after it was published. I just finished my third reading. Each time it gets better.

The book follows the typical Beckwith format. Short, one or two page lessons. You can jump in anywhere in the book … read for very short periods of time or read for long pleasurable periods. It is well written and contains some of the most succinct lessons on branding, marketing, selling, client attraction and retention that you will find anywhere.

It is not a book to be read once and put on the shelf. You will gain the most value if you revisit it periodically. The lessons are so short and to the point, there is no way you could retain all the information in one reading. You need repeated exposure to the information in this book.

Some of the more valuable lessons are:

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. The more there is to hear, the less we listen.

We are drowning in information and screaming for knowledge.

Growing complexity makes us covet the simple.

Say little - a simple point penetrates.

Clarity is expertise.

We are generally more persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than those given to us.

Four rules for choosing clients.

Trust your instincts. If something feels wrong, it will be. Bad clients don’t produce minimal results, they produce losses. If a prospect is more interested in cost, you will never be happy and always be vulnerable. You cannot cut a bad deal with a good person or a good deal with a bad person.

Throughout the book, Beckwith cites many books that are well worth reading. At the end of the book is a great appendix that in itself is worth the price of the book.

Well worth reading.

Extremely helpful by freedomrox
I’m new to sales, so I’m no expert; but this book seemed perfect. I’ve listened to it twice and intend to do so a few more times. It’s all about putting yourself in your client’s place and acting with passion based on belief and purpose. There are also lots of good practical suggestions from how to dress to naming your business.

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