What Clients Love

December 23, 2002
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. (Jan. 2)Forecast:There are planned ads in the
New York Times, the
Wall Street Journal,
Money and
Fortune; Web marketing; a TV satellite tour; blurbs from business sage Seth Godin; and the success of Beckwith's last book. It all adds up to what book publishers love: a hit.

December 15, 2002
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. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)