What Clients Love:

A Field Guide to Growing Your Business

by Harry Beckwith

What Clients Love: A Field Guide to Growing Your Business, is by Harry Beckwith, who also wrote The Invisible Touch and the marketing classic, Selling the Invisible (1997). Beckwith's books are all composed of one and two-page chapters that make a quick point and then move on. This makes them a fast read, even at 250+ pages. Each chapter ends with a short bolded point that crystallizes the meaning of that chapter. Many of these points reiterate what Beckwith said in the first two books, but all remain excellent approaches for connecting with your customer, which is really Beckwith's central concern in all three books.

Let's start with Beckwith's marketing suggestions, which fly in the face of many marketing practices. He starts by saying you should avoid superlatives, suggesting that every time you have used a superlative in your own marketing, you should replace it with a proof of the point the superlative was trying to make. He also says always use the more personal "you" in your marketing pieces and avoid adverbs or adjectives. In short, Beckwith suggests keeping your marketing messages as short, as personal, and as graphic as possible.

He makes these points most dramatically when he gives his proscriptions regarding PowerPoint presentations. Beckwith says, "Impressive slide shows aren't." He looks at PowerPoint slides with so much text that either the presenter or the watcher is forced to read (is there a businessperson out there who hasn't heard or even given such a presentation?). His advice, which at first seems too radical, is that each slide should have no more than three lines and that each line should be edited to no more than three words. Beckwith's point is that this edited slide presentation requires discipline, forces the presenter to focus on key points, makes the presentation more forceful, and gives the audience more reason and time to look at the presenter. This is important because the presenter is trying to connect with the audience and reading off slides loses both eye contact and forcefulness.

Another bit of marketing wisdom is a point reiterated from an earlier book: perfect storytelling. Beckwith feels that people learn best when they are told a story. Beckwith argues that firms should nail down the stories they are going to tell about themselves and practice telling them-until everyone tells roughly the same stories. This has to do with establishing your firm's uniqueness. At one point, Beckwith says that if you can't describe your firm's uniqueness in under twenty five words, there is probably something wrong with your business model.

It's very hard to review this book without falling back on some of the author's own lines. In discussing what sort of advertising media is best, Beckwith says that relationships are the most powerful kind of media. For those of us in service industries (and Beckwith feels that all of us are in service industries) this has a particular resonance.

At the very end of What Clients Love is a list of traits that clients love and they are insightful and excellent selection criteria for relationship managers. His listed traits are:

1. Humility and Generosity: the major point is, never praise yourself or criticize a competitor.

2. Willingness to sacrifice: Beckwith uses the example of a Nordstrom clerk ready to go home when she receives a frantic call from a businessman who has forgotten to bring his cufflinks to a critical presentation. She takes the time to deliver his cufflinks, making a loyal customer for life. Beckwith's moral? Give something up and you will get more back.

3. Openness: "In business as in life, people who reveal themselves-who admit mistakes or weaknesses, for example--communicate that they trust the person to whom they reveal themselves....Revelations build the foundation of lasting relationships: trust."

4. Integrity: It's the highest form of quality, without which there is no trust. As Mark Twain says, "Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."

5. Ability to provide comfort: As a representative of a service industry, you must be able to provide security when you sell people on using your service. If you can't-for whatever reason-you will kill relationships and kill your business.

We are highly recommending this book and its two predecessors because we think it would be very hard to read any of Beckwith and not come away with something that you could immediately apply to connecting with customers and improving your business. We believe, as Beckwith does, that establishing such connectedness with customers is the way to grow your business.

Reviewed by S4 Consulting

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