What Clients Love

Beckwith delivers an audio every bit as extraordinary as his earlier works, SELLING THE INVISIBLE and THE INVISIBLE TOUCH. Delivered with a sardonic tone that works with the material, his message is that almost everything you think is important in marketing, sales, and communication is not. It's the relationship, stupid, and very little else matters when it comes to motivating people to work with us, buy from us, help us, hire us, or consider our ideas. Though cocky as the dickens, the author offers valuable personal stories of trial and error, and his intimate delivery makes him almost lovable. He knows our confusion. He's one of us. A fresh approach to fresh ideas, a wake-up call for anyone in business, and a stimulating listening experience. T.W. 2004 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

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.