What Clients Love: A Field Guide to Growing Your Business

Snappy presentation on selling and branding

This is a pleasant contemporary book on selling and branding in a marketplace where the average consumer is deluged with 3,200 advertising messages a day. In a format that makes for an excellent read while traveling, the book consists of short, colorful 300 to 1,000 word treatments of various topics, such as selling, branding and customer service. At times, author Harry Beckwith¿s approach seems episodic. It¿s not always clear what one section has to do with another. However, he nicely avoids business-speak jargon, and spatters the book with accessible pop culture examples, including motion pictures, clever ads and other common points of reference. The book¿s shortcoming resides more in the area of substance and depth of thinking. Each brief essay ends with a catchy one-sentence aphorism such as: 'Comfort clients and you will keep them' or 'Edit your message until everyone understands it.' The author has invested a great deal of time devising colorful ways to tell you things that, upon further reflection, you probably already know. Yet, we find that the short-bite, snappy presentation makes the book interesting. If you¿re too busy to keep up on the latest trends in marketing and sales, reading this is an excellent way to make sure you¿re current.

Read & Heed

I could not put this book down. With so many other things filling my busy day, it was good finding someting to read between redlights and coffee orders. I recommend it to any serious business owner/operator.

From the author

Please realize I had to rate this book for this note to appear, and I can honestly say--as I say in the introduction and acknowledgments--that I love this one. Thanks are due, in part, to several of you reading this. Your notes and calls during the last seven years have helped me understand what readers love, and what you need to know. For books of this type--books designed to help, inform and inspire--brevity counts. Time is the new gold and all of us seek ways to find and save it. The rush to find a web browser and internet connection that allows downloads in microseconds instead of split-seconds--saving us a total of a ninety seconds per day--seems the perfect example. So this book was written once and edited over 30 times, read aloud each time in search of the most succinct expression. This approach is not literary; the design is not to craft sentences that readers will contemplate and even reread, and a few that they might remember and praise. The goal, instead, is to be understood immediately and without effort. Some readers assume from a more erudite- sounding style a greater depth of thought. In this case, considerable thought goes into both the idea and its expression--so that great thought isn't required to understand it. Perhaps there are more complex notions that also drive business. But this must be said: the businesses that thrive are not mastering the complex. They are conquering the simple, day after day. They do it the way of any master: they practice. Pick up this book anywhere, find an idea that resonates, and practice it. Soon, you will adapt to the practice and the act will become second-nature, and then it will become not merely what you do, but who you are. It's remarkable--or so it seems to me, anyway, and it touches your entire life. Please, then, keep writing with suggestions and questions. A final request: I hope you read the first two and last two paragraphs of the acknowledgments. This section reveals of the great rewards of authorship: the chance not merely to count your blessings, but to enumerate them. Thanks. . .and best wishes to all, Harry B

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