SELLING THE INVISIBLE is a succinct and often entertaining look at the unique characteristics of services and their prospects, and how any service, from a home-based consultancy to a multinational brokerage, can turn more prospects into clients and keep them. SELLING THE INVISIBLE covers service marketing from start to finish. Filled with wonderful insights and written in a roll-up-your-sleeves, jargon-free, accessible style, such as:

• Greatness May Get You Nowhere
• Focus Groups Don’ts
• The More You Say, the Less People Hear &
• Seeing the Forest Around the Falling Trees.

This book presents the crucial concepts of new marketing. In an age where more than seventy percent of people in the United States earn their living working for service companies, the old product-marketing model is no longer viable. Instead of emphasizing features and benefits, new marketers need to work on developing lasting relationships with their clients. Those who learn this first will be able to attract the largest number of clients, even in a market that is becoming over-saturated with commodities and services. Harry Beckwith’s excellent book offers numerous useful tips in a highly readable format. Few chapters are more than a page long, and he offers enough insightful stories and eclectic examples to keep even the most time-pressed reader interested. Recommended for people trying to market a service and to those interested in ideas about marketing.

• To distinguish your product in today’s market, add value through exemplary service.
• Instead of trying to force your product (service) into peoples’ living rooms, work steadily to improve your service.
• Since services are essentially invisible and intangible, customers approach them with discomfort. Understand this and assuage it.
• Features and benefits are good selling points, but your best selling point is a great relationship with your customer.
• Marketing should occur at every point of contact between your firm and your client.
• Clients don’t understand what you do. Sell them on the technical points of your relationship rather than on the technical aspects of your service.
• Your clients don’t want to hear about you. They want to hear about themselves and how you can help them.
• Build a brand that people can trust.
• When marketing your service, use stories that exhibit the traits you want to convey.
• In your advertisements, say one thing exceptionally well.

The Nature of Services and Why You Need to Know About Them

Services are invisible. For the most part, you cannot see, hear, taste, or touch them before you buy. The service industry, however, is hardly invisible. More than seventy percent of Americans make their living working for service companies. Many of them are struggling because their service-economy businesses continue to follow product-marketing models.

“Common sense will only get you so far. For inspiring results, you’ll need inspiration.”

Products are not invisible. Selling a haircut or legal advice is not like selling a new car. When you sell a product, you are selling something that people can judge with their five senses. You can put it before them or let them try it. Then they can decide if they like it, need it, and can afford it. When you sell a service, you sell a promise. Your clients cannot immediately evaluate what you are giving them; only time and overall performance will tell.

“In service marketing, almost nothing beats a brand.”

Clients don’t always know if they need your service in the first place. People wait years to fix leaky faucets or to hire someone to paint those hard-to-reach places. Clients aren’t even sure what your service costs, since the price will vary depending on the time and extent of the service rendered.

“A service is a promise, and building a brand builds your promise.”

If you continue to sell your service as if it were a product – focusing on the features or benefits instead of the relationship between you and your customer – you will continue to underachieve.

Likewise, if you continue to sell your product without a good service instinct, you will not be able to distinguish your product from others just like it. We live and work in the age of the over-saturated market. Product-distinction techniques don’t work as well as they used to; there are just too many commodities.

“This focus on getting the word outside distracts companies from the inside, and from the first rule of service marketing: The core of service marketing is the service itself.”

To market your product effectively, either lower the price or increase its value. To increase value, improve your service.

The Nature of Prospects and Why You Need to Know About Them

The service environment – where the selling of the intangible takes place – creates an anxious prospect (customer). This anxiety is your starting point.

“You can’t learn from your strategy. It’s just sitting there pretending it knows what it’s talking about, while your tactics are out there getting battle tested by the market.”

Clients only come to you for services because they cannot or will not perform the service themselves. In many cases, clients will walk into your office with no knowledge of what is required, but that’s why they came to you in the first place. So don’t try to fill their heads with all the job’s details. They won’t understand.

“Execute passionately. Marginal tactics executed passionately almost always will outperform brilliant tactics executed marginally.”

Instead, fill their hearts with the confidence that you (or your company) are the person (or the company) for the job. Make them feel that you are capable of performing the task. Build a relationship with your prospect. This will assuage their fears about the invisible service that they want to purchase. They will know if they feel valued by you, and if you care enough to go the extra mile. These are the things that weigh most heavily in clients’ decisions about whether or not to use you or your company.

“Unlike communicating about products, communicating about services must make the service more tangible and real, and must soothe the worried prospect.”

Remember, in your clients’ minds, they come first – their feelings, gut reactions, and thought patterns. Too many service marketers think that their service comes first. Concentrate less on trying to make your clients want your service and more on making them feel wanted.

Clients notice your shoes, your watch, and your style of dress. These signs can reassure them or diminish their confidence in you. Every time your company comes into contact with your customers – whether it’s your employees, business card, brochure, ad, or building – they are evaluating you at some level.

“Like clever journalists and great lawyers, marketers who tell true stories make their presentations more interesting, more personal…and more persuasive.”

Your customers can also serve you. If you develop a strong and lasting relationship with them, they will undoubtedly refer you to friends and family. When it comes to the invisible service industry, customers often go where someone tells them to go. As a service provider, you need to build a base of customers who are willing to vouch for you.

Things to Avoid in the Service Industry

Incorrect assumptions can obscure the truth behind marketing a service in several key areas:

1. The Lake Wobegon Effect

Psychologists use this term to describe people who think they are better than they really are. Don’t be one of them. Even if your service is above average, it still might not be as good as it could, or should, be.

2. The Assumption that Everything is Fine

When you begin to market your service, don’t take anything for granted. Ask the tough questions that probe the very foundation of the company. Is the company in the right business? Is it staffed properly? Is the service useful?

3. Competitive Strategy

Your true competitors are not necessarily other companies – often they are prospects. Convince these clients to use your service. Soothe their fears.

4. The Pricing Obsession

Pricing is hard to figure out and far less logical than many people think. When you set your price, watch your customers’ reaction. If no one complains, chances are it’s too low. If everyone complains, it’s too high. Shoot for a level of 15 to 20 percent resistance. This method is far superior to the practice of determining the prevailing high and low rates and then setting your price in the middle. This tells your prospect how good (or bad) you think you are.

5. Your Mission Statement

Is it overly visible, abstract, or underachieving? If you tell your competitors where you’re going or want to go, they might get there first. Keep your mission statement out of your marketing campaign. When you create a mission statement, make sure it is specific. Investors and employees want and need to know where they are going. Be sure your mission statement isn’t too vague.

6. Silence

If someone isn’t complaining, it doesn’t mean they are satisfied. In fact, in a service relationship, it may mean that your customer is dissatisfied. Most people don’t like conflict. They will suffer for a while in silence, then disappear. Keep your relationships in constant repair.

7. Hype

If you create an impossible gap between what your customer expects and what they get, you have set the stage for mutual dissatisfaction.

8. Anchoring

Don’t remain anchored to your original perceptions or impressions, or you could grow stagnant. However, realize that your customers are anchored to certain perceptions and impressions. Do they have perceptions you want to change? If so, how?

9. The Grocery List

When dealing with long lists, people tend to forget things. Keep your advertising message short and simple.

10. Being Great

Service customers aren’t necessarily looking for the best or most skillful provider. They are looking for a relationship with someone they can trust. It’s important to be good at what you do, but it’s more important to be good at who you are.

Planning

The process of planning with your team may ultimately be more important in the long run than the results of your plan. Begin by hiring bright people who will make a bright future possible. For better planning, remember:

1. Tactics are more important than abstract strategy. Follow your tactics onto the battlefield. Learn from your battles. Act.
2. Ideas are only real when you become passionate about them. Don’t spend all of your time looking for the best idea. Pick up a small idea and run with it.
3. The right time is right now. Don’t put something on the back burner because you think it is not ready for the world, or that the world is not ready for it. If you don’t do it now someone else will.
4. Your experience has limits. But you can’t possible experience everything, so reach beyond your own experience. Avoid basing decisions on generalizations.
5. Common sense will take you to a common level. Inspiration will take you to uncommon levels.
6. Watch the power in your organization. Is it crushing good ideas? Is it leading the organization in the right direction? If you’re one of the powerful people, learn to listen and step aside. If you’re not, don’t stop questioning the powerful.

Take Marketing Out of the Marketing Department

If you leave all the marketing of your company to one department, you’re not doing all you can to market your company. Everyone in your company can have an effect on your marketing every time they come into contact with a client. Stop thinking of marketing as a department and start thinking of it as your business.

“For all the talk about improving service quality, positioning, research, targeted direct mail-for all the art and science of marketing-much of growing a business is where you happen to sit on a flight to New York one afternoon.”

Do your people realize that everything they do plays a part in the marketing of the company? Have you taken a close look at all your points of contact with customers? At each point, is the customer seeing the best that you have to offer? Remember that you are selling a relationship along with a service.

“Prospects do not buy how good you are at what you do. They buy how good you are at who you are.”

Names and Brands

1. Don’t use initials or acronyms for your name. Initials worked for IBM, but chances are, it won’t work for you.
2. Don’t include words in your name that everyone expects from your service. For example, don’t use the word “quality.” That’s a given.
3. If you don’t have an ordinary company, don’t give it an ordinary name. Use your own name if you can’t come up with something better.
4. Test your name: how much information does it convey?
5. Brands are alive and well. In the service industry, where a warranty is hard to come by, they are your handshake, your promise. Provide one.
6. When building a brand, remember that it all starts with your employees. One mistreated customer could cost you thousands of dollars.
7. A brand is a shortcut. Customers go with what they know.
8. People’s minds make subconscious connections. Make sure your brand name carries no negative connotations.
9. Use your imagination.

The Power of Language

Words have a self-fulfilling character. They do not just represent reality – they create it. In the service industry, where you are essentially selling the invisible, words become weapons. They can help or hurt you. Use active words to describe your service. Avoid cliches. Don’t just describe; shape the image you want. Affect change. To do this, have a point. Direct, vivid language will help your service stand out in the crowd. Keep your name circulating in print, whether you have to advertise or appear in articles written by someone else.

“Sweat the small stuff.”

Most important, market yourself by telling true stories that relate to the service. Genuine, personal stories stick with people and influence them.

Harry Beckwith, founder of Beckwith Advertising and Marketing, won the American Marketing Association’s Effie award. He has worked for several of America’s best 100 service companies and nine Fortune 500 companies. Selling the Invisible is his first book. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and children.