Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing | Harry Beckwith

Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing | Harry Beckwith | Know Where To Hammer

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Selling the Invisi...

	Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing Harry Beckwith Business Plus, 1997 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 142 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A comprehensive guide to service marketing furnishes tips and advice on how one can apply one's business knowledge to any area of sales and marketing, from a home-based consultancy to a multinational brokerage firm.

A Great Book.

Great advice on how to sell a service.
I have a Moleskine full of notes from this book.
I have a photography business and I'm implementing the tactics from this awesome book now!

Know Where To Hammer

The excellent book Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing by Harry Beckwith makes many great points about service marketing, including that a good solution today is better than a perfect solution tomorrow. A ready-fire-aim approach (implement first, then iterate to fix mistakes) is generally better than a ready-aim-fire approach (wait for the perfect solution, then implement). You've still got to aim. You've still got to fire. But you may need to reconsider the order.

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Very Well Done - Get This and Potter's "Winning" Book

Now, this is the book to get from Beckwith - don't waste your time with "What Clients Love" (60% of that book is in here and the rest of it is largely a promo for why you need hire a professional branding firm).

This book has lots of good gems that you should be able to put to use right away, including:

- the three stages of a service company and the relationship to positioning and sales

- tips on customer/client surveys

- why, when selling a service, you're actually selling a relationship and what to do

- how prospects decide

- why the there are really 2 aspects you bill for: the commodity (such as hammering a nail) and the expertise (knowing where to hammer)

And so on. Very well done.

As a side note, what this book will not do for you is lay out a plan for you to compete in this "invisible" market effectively; for that, take a look at Potter's "Winning in the Invisible Market."

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Worth the price for 1.5 pages rated below

It's a good read, but there is a page and half that has had a major impact, showing me where I have a huge blindspot in business and how I stop my own progress. This page and a half is possibly the most important material I've read in a book in several years (for me it applies directly).

The author talks about the Fallacy of Planning in a business setting. He ranks plans in this order:

1. Very Good
2. Good
3. Best
4. Fair
5. Poor

Why is Good ahead of Best? Simple, to arrive at Best takes orders of magnitude more planning than Good. Also, who defines Best? How much time is spent creating the Best plan? Will Best stand the test of time? Can everyone agree on Best? Would Good work just as well as Best in the real world? Is Best satisfying the client's need better than a Good plan?

Choosing the "Best" plan leads to Paralysis by Analysis. Good plans allow for quick action and constant improvement. The most successful people in the world have acted on Good plans that they have refined over time. An actionable plan is more successful than a plan that never leaves the drawing board!

Personally, I've fallen into the Best trap many times. There is no such thing as a "Best" plan. Going forward the "Best" plan will be the "Good" plan that I can put into action and refine over time!

A lightbulb went off in my head when I got this concept. Thank you Harry for this valuable lesson.

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Drinking from a fire hose

Nutshell review - This little book has +/-200 tips and points about marketing in service businesses. These are presented in a collection of short stories or mini-chapters of a paragraph or two with a bullet point note at the end - a field guide indeed. It's a bit like drinking from a fire hose with almost too many points being made but if just a few points help your cause then it will have been a worthwhile read.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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