Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing

by Harry Beckwith

If you cannot see the differences in your service, look harder.

Don’t start by positioning your service. Instead, leverage the position you have.

Choose a position that will reposition your competitors; then move a step back towa rd the middle to cinch the sale.

The small service must start with small. It must dance with the one that brung it. In positioning, don’t try to hide your small size. Make it work by stressing its advantages, such as responsiveness and individual attention.

Focus. In everything from campaigns for peanuts to campaigns for president, focus wins.

Don’t assume that logical pricing is smart pricing. Maybe your price, which makes you look like a good value, actually makes you look second-rate.

If no one complains about your price, it’s too low.

Resistance in 10 percent of those remaining cases—for a total of almost 20 percent—is about right. When it starts exceeding 25 percent, scale back. Setting your price is like setting a screw. A little resistance is a good sign.

Another problem with this pricing strategy is the Problem of the Deadly Middle. If you are the high-priced provider, most people assume you offer the best quality—a desirable position. If you are the low-cost provider, most people assume you deliver an acceptable product at the lowest cost—also a desirable position. But if you price in the middle, what you are saying—again—is: “We’re not the best, and neither is our price, but both our service and price are pretty good.” Not a very compelling message. The premium service and the low-cost provider occupy nice niches all by themselves. If you are priced in between, however, you are competing with almost everyone. And that’s a lot of everyones. Beware of the Deadly Middle.

Don’t charge by the hour. Charge by the years.

Charge for knowing where.

Value is not a competitive position. Value is what every service promises, implicitly or explicitly. It is fundamental to survival. A service’s price must fairly reflect its value to the customer, or the service eventually will fail.

In services, value is a given. And givens are not viable competitive positions. If good value is the first thing you communicate, you won’t be effective. If good value is your best position, improve your service.

Give your service a name, not a monogram.

In service marketing, almost nothing beats a brand.

Building your brand doesn’t take millions. It takes imagination.

The first two rules of communicating about services: Make the service visible, and make the prospect comfortable.

People are interested in themselves. Until you realize that, you will be beaten badly by your toughest competitor: indifference. Your first competitor is indifference.

You’ve experienced the cocktail party phenomenon. It works like this: You’re listening to someone at a cocktail party. Suddenly, you hear your name mentioned in a nearby conversation. Now you can hear that conversation, but you no longer can hear the one in which you were involved. This happens because people cannot process two conversations at once. If you deliver two messages, most people will process just one of them—if that. Say one thing.

Saying many things usually communicates nothing.

Meet your market’s very first need: Give it one good reason.

After you say one thing, repeat it again and again.

Like clever journalists and great lawyers, marketers who tell true stories make their presentations more interesting, more personal, more credible, and more felt—and more persuasive. Don’t use adjectives. Use stories.

Almost every well-known service suffers from a well-known stereotype. Accountants are humorless. Lawyers are greedy. Collections agencies are bullies. Doctors keep you waiting. The stereotype of your service is the first thing that a prospect thinks about. It is the first hurdle you must jump, and the first one over usually wins. Attack your first weakness: the stereotype the prospect has about you.

Good basic communicating is good basic marketing.

Create the evidence of your service quality. Then communicate it.

A service is a promise. You’re selling the promise that at some future date, you will do something. This means what you really are selling is your honesty. Tricks and gimmicks aren’t honest. Gimmicky headlines, swimsuit models, direct marketing tricks—they’re all a form of bait and switch. And these tricks say one thing. They tell your prospects you are willing to trick them. And that tells your prospects that you’ll try to trick them again. Don’t. No tricks.

If you think your promotional idea might seem silly or unprofessional, it is.

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

“What is the main reason you continue to do business with this company?” the most common answer they hear, even from clients of superior services, is “I just feel comfortable with them.” Not superiority. Not even excellence. Just simple old leather-slippers comfort.

Convey that you are “positively good.”

Far better to say too little than too much.

People will trust their eyes far before they will ever trust your word s.

Prospects look for visual clues about a service. If they find none, they often look to services that do have them. So provide clues. Make sure people see who you are.

every day in every city and town, this same act plays itself out when people choose a service. Not knowing what’s really inside the service, people look to the outside. Unable to see the service, they choose it based solely on the things they can see—in many cases, even when they know better. Seeing is believing. So check your peel.

The critics miss the point. They assume that restaurants are in the food business. Not so; restaurants are in the entertainment business. People go to restaurants for the experience.

Watch—and perfect—the visual clues you send.

Repeat yourself visually, too. It makes you look more organized and professional, and easier to remember.

The prospect is being invited into a relationship, and wonders—with whom? Who are these people? This is what the prospect is asking, yet most service companies ignore the question. They institutionalize their company instead of personalizing it. The prospect wants to see flesh and blood;

Good salespeople know better. They know that if a prospect declines a face-to-face meeting but requests “some information about your company,” they rarely will make the sale. They know the prospect must see them to believe them, and buy.

Give your marketing a human face.

You don’t listen to clichés. Your clients won’t either.

“Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.” Get to the point or you will never get to the close.

Tell people—in a single compelling sentence—why they should buy from you instead of someone else.

In your words and pictures, make yourself vivid.

“You cannot bore someone into buying your product.”

If you want more publicity, do more advertising.

If you want editors to help you, help them. Give them something interesting. Give them a story.

There is no such thing as an uninteresting subject, someone once wrote. There is only an uninterested person.

Look harder. The interest—and the story—are there.