In this episode, I unpack the lessons from “Selling the Invisible” by Harry Beckwith.
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Full Transcript:
There’s a unique challenge when it comes to trying to market services, things you can’t see, touch, or try before buying. Unlike products, services are essentially promises that someone will do something for you. Traditional product marketing often fails for services because prospects can’t evaluate what they’re buying until after they’ve bought it. Service marketing must start with improving the service itself before trying to sell it, but quality alone isn’t enough. Since services are invisible, everything visible matters enormously, from your business card to how quickly you answer the phone.
Small details create huge impressions. People buy services based on relationships and feelings more than logic. They choose what feels familiar and safe rather than what’s demonstrably superior. So I’m Mickey Mellen, this is Stacking Knowledge, and that was a little bit from Harry Beckwith’s classic book, Selling the Invisible. So let’s dig in. This book has like 150 chapters in it or something, a lot of short chapters, which I really like reading. Often I’ll go through every chapter. I am not gonna do that today, so we’re gonna kinda jump around a little bit, just hit some of the highlights here, because this is fantastic book. It was written…
I think 25 years ago. So a lot of the examples in it are old, but it still does a lot of great things. So early on he talks about the greatest misconception about service marketing. And he said, the first step in service marketing is your service. You should focus on your service. That’s a thing people get wrong about. They try to figure out how to make their marketing better when their service is not any good. Your service has to be great. And he says, ⁓ another chapter is called A World On Hold. He says, first, before you write an ad, rent a list, dash off a press release, fix your service. So.
He spends a while talking about fixing your service, making sure it’s awesome, because that’s going to make you succeed in the long run. I think that kind of goes without saying, but I said it anyhow. Another chapter he says, let your clients set your standards. The quote from the book, says, in advertising, when most creative people say, that’s a really good ad, they don’t mean that the ad might build the client’s business. They just mean the ad has a good headline, a good visual. It’s good. It’s neat. It’s cool. It’s not necessarily all that helpful. You don’t want people to be impressed by your ads. You want your ad to actually move the needle. He says in there,
Ask who’s setting your standards, your industry, your ego, or your clients, and your standards should follow that. Related, he says, bad news, you’re competing with Walt Disney. Ignore your industry’s benchmarks and copy Disney’s. And I’ve seen that said before, like people say, I have a commodity product. You say, okay, you’re a commodity, but what if Disney entered that market? Would they treat it as a commodity? And they certainly wouldn’t. And so you should think of it in that way too. Don’t look at what your industry’s doing. See what Disney might do with something like that. Jumping ahead, he has a little bit about focus groups and surveys and that kind of stuff.
One thing he mentioned a few times though, he has a chapter called focus groups don’t. He said you’re selling to individuals, talk to individuals. He’s not a big fan of focus groups because people will kind of get some group think going and just talk to people, have conversations. Another section he has called marketing is not a department. Everyone should be marketing. He says in the book quote, more than half of all Japanese companies do not even bother to have marketing departments because they believe that everyone in the company is part of the marketing. Marketing is not a department, it is your business.
He says, start with you and your employees. He says in the book, review every step from how your receptionist answers to the message on the bottom of your invoices and ask what you could do differently to attract and keep more customers. Every act is a marketing act. Make sure every employer, yeah, make every employee a marketing person. Every act is a marketing act to make every employee a marketing person. Then he gets in like, what are you really selling? Cause he has a lot of the book that you’re not really selling what people think you are. Kind of I mentioned in the intro piece there, you know, it’s not like that. He was talking about Burger King and how they decided
McDonald’s has cheap burgers, they’re selling great, we’re gonna have better flame-boiled burgers. This is gonna be awesome, we’re gonna kill it. And by all accounts, their burgers are and were better, but it didn’t really move the needle. said, McDonald’s came along and figured out that people weren’t buying hamburgers, people were buying an experience. Maybe you think your prospects in your industry are looking for hamburgers. Chances are they want something else. The first company to figure out what that is wins. And so to his point, again, McDonald’s isn’t selling hamburgers, I mean they are, but it’s the convenience and the…
consistent quality, know, good or bad, it’s usually pretty consistent. There’s something that kind of thing. You can do it quick, you can do it cheap. You know what you’re getting. They’re not selling hamburgers. People aren’t there for that. They’re just trying to get something in their belly to move on and that’s what they have. In Burger King trying to improve the quality, again, they did, but they didn’t really meet the need that people really had. And he says, find out what clients are really buying. Next he goes into one thing most experts don’t know. It’s a longer quote here, but he says, most companies in expert services, such as lawyers, doctors, and accountants,
think that their clients are buying expertise. But most prospects for these complex services cannot evaluate expertise. They cannot tell a really good tax return, a clever motion, or a perceptive diagnosis. But they can tell if the relationship is good and if phone calls are returned. Clients are experts at knowing if they feel valued. In most professional services, you’re not really selling expertise because your expertise is assumed and because your prospect cannot intelligently evaluate your expertise anyway. Instead, you are selling a relationship, and in most cases, that is where you need the most work.
So he summarized the chapter basically saying, if you’re selling a service, you’re selling a relationship. Related to that, he says, with whom are you really competing? He says, your real competitor is often sitting across the table, plan accordingly. The real competitor being apathy. A lot of things you sell, especially marketing services like we do and that kind of stuff, there’s us versus our competition, but there’s also the status quo. Like our website’s not great, but it’s good enough. We’ll live with it for a while. We don’t need to do better on social media. We’re okay. We could do better, but maybe we won’t.
It’s us versus the service that we offer versus the competitors we have, but versus apathy. I think a lot of service service companies have that same issue. You know, you’re, you’re not competing just against your competitors. You’re competing against the person across the table convincing them that they need to make a change. ⁓ he says, study your points of contact. He says, ask, what are we doing to make a phenomenal impression at every point? Don’t squander one point of contact. It may be your only one. So he says, study each point of contact and improve each one significantly.
Here’s another chapter I didn’t like, but I agree with. said, life is like high school. In large part, service marketing is a popularity contest. And we’ve kind of talked about that a little bit. It’s not, it should be in a perfect world. I have the better service at the better price. I win. And we all know that’s not how it goes. And he covers that quite a bit in this book. It’s a lot of stories and anecdotes that really back that up. It’s worth, again, this book’s worth reading through for sure. He talks about that, but in large part, service marketing is a popularity contest.
Then he gets into a bunch of fallacies. He has 18 fallacies he goes through. I’m not going to cover all 18, but there’s a few that stood out to me that I really liked. He said, ⁓ you can know what you want. He said, second, the second fallacy, don’t value planning for its result. The plan, the greatest value of the plan is the process, the thinking that went into it. This is where I see AI being very problematic for a lot of people. They say, let AI come up with a plan for me and I’ll just execute. But the value is building the plan and going through it and kind of the struggle that you have in doing that and coming up with new ideas and trying things out and.
So the plan itself is great. I mean, if you have a good plan, that’s obviously fantastic. But the greatest value of the plan is the process and the thinking that went into it. He says in other fallacies that strategy is king. And his summary there is do anything. And then later, he says the fallacies, there will be a perfect time. He says the summary there is do it now. The business obituary pages are filled with planners who waited. And so again, perfect is the enemy of good. We’ve talked about quite a few times on here that.
Again, make things great for sure, but if you wait for it be perfect, you’re gonna wait too long. And again, the business obituary pages are filled with planners who waited. They waited for the perfect time, the perfect plan, and waited and waited and just never did anything. And it kind of falls apart that way. He talks about the fallacy of confidence. This was a very interesting little study. He said, quote, the people tested answered a series of questions and then answered this question about each answer. From one to 100%, how certain are you about this answer? What happened?
On the answers which people say they are totally 100 % certain, they were right only 85 % of the time. In other words, 15 % of the time you think you are absolutely certain, you are absolutely wrong. In most services that 15 % error, those wrong but widespread assumptions that everyone in the company is making is the most leverageable part of your business. Find it and attack it. So again, you’re all gonna assume here are the things we know about our customers, we know about our product, we know these things for sure. He’s saying 15 % of those that you know for sure you might be wrong about so.
assume you’re maybe wrong about any of them. At least, you he says, find it and attack it. You figure out what might be wrong. He shares a little bit from J Chai who says he carries a note in his pocket. The note reminds him that whenever he’s in an argument, he should remember the notes three words. Maybe he’s right. And so yeah, you never know. Again, you can be entirely confident and you should be confident and should know your facts and stuff, but maybe he’s right. So the summary here is beware of the overconfidence bias. Maybe he’s right. Another one, another fallacy he has is perfection is perfection.
And perhaps the most important, will all that excellence really benefit the person for whom it’s intended? Will the prospect or customer care? Will it be worth the cost to them? So talks about if you’re trying to make things absolutely perfect, will that really matter? If it’s a tiny bit better, if you use nails that look bit better on the underside of the deck you’re building, does that really matter? It is better, it is more perfect, but will the prospect or customers care? Again, he says, don’t let perfect ruin good. So again, I’m not arguing to be sloppy for sure, but.
There’s a point at which perfection becomes problematic and makes you wait too long or become too expensive or a lot of other things that can be problematic. He says the fallacy of common sense, another chapter in this section, he says, quote, but in planning, people do not stumble into reaching conclusions. They err in establishing their premises. The summary I like to hear there is a good answer is useless if it’s the wrong question. You may have the perfect answer to a question, but if it’s the wrong question, you’re not using common sense to ask the right question. That’s problematic. So he says the summary there is common sense will only get you so far.
For inspiring results, you’ll need inspiration. We get into the next section here. talks about prospects like to choose the familiar. Familiar kind of always wins. He says, all evidence suggests that it is better to be known badly than not to be known at all. This is due to a human trait called attribute forgetting. Let’s say that you hear something negative about a company. As time passes, you tend to forget that negative information. You forget the attributes and remember only the company name.
That’s the attribute forgetting. So you still remember this name. You don’t really remember why, but they’re in your head now and that’s of benefit to them. So he says familiarity breeds business. Spread your word however you can. And again, not advocating, advocating you do silly things, but again, it just getting your name out there is generally a good thing in general. Another chapter he has is called business is in the details. The more similar the services, the more important the differences. So accentuate the trivial, you know, a lot of
Most of you I’m talking to, you can probably name a bunch of other companies very similar to yours. So the more similar the services, the more important the differences, and you should accentuate those differences as much as you’re able to. The next section he talks about is the more you say, the less people hear with a lot of positioning in this section, a lot of chapters about positioning and focus. So he says fanatical focus stand for one distinctive thing that will give you a competitive advantage. The fear of positioning, people are afraid to position because they’ll get the…
lower their audience too much. I’d rather have an audience of eight billion people than just the 300,000 that are for my product, but that’s really what you need. To broaden your appeal, you should narrow that position. then he gets a lot into positioning here. I’m not gonna cover it too much, because this whole series of chapters in here dig into it real deep. so if you’ve not looked at positioning closely, I encourage you to look in here. ⁓ He says, position is a passive noun, not an active verb. The example here, well, the summary first was.
Don’t start by positioning your service. Instead, leverage the position you have. His argument here is that you can’t change your position. Your company has a position, and so just leverage what you have. You leverage that position. So the example he gives us, the old Avis ads years ago that were, they used for years and years that said, we’re number two. Avis was number two. They weren’t the number one car rental place. They were number two. So their slogan was, we’re number two. We try harder. So they said, hey, our position is number two. So that means how do we position our position?
is we try harder because we’re number two and it worked. mean, sales soared when I started that campaign. If you’ve not done a positioning statement before, he kind of walks through the steps to do that. I’ll hit that quickly here, but there’s really, I believe there’s seven pieces to this. He talks about it’s the who, what, for whom, what need, against whom, what’s different and so, and so who, who are you? What, what business are you in? For whom, what people do you serve? What need, what are the special needs of the people you serve? Against whom, with whom are you competing?
What’s different? What makes you different from those competitors? And so, so what’s the benefit? What unique benefit is a client derived from your service? So figure out who you are, what you do, what the specific needs of the people you serve are and who the competition is and what makes you different. You can really stand out and it can work very well. If you, he says, ask yourself these seven questions and have seven good clear answers. And then another piece of this positioning. He said, your position is all in people’s minds. Find out what that position is. So again, your position exists out there already.
your position is what it is. Avis is number two and you know there’s different things like that. Figure out what that position is and then use it. He gave another example I believe with the city of Seattle trying to get tourists and people here Seattle they think rain. So they leaned in and they said hey these months of the year it rains like crazy out here it’s miserable but that makes it so it’s green and beautiful and here’s all the great things we have out here because of all that rain. And so they kind of leaned into the rain saying yeah it’s raining here but man look at the great stuff we get as a result of that.
And so, yeah, they’re gonna change the position. You can’t say, it’s not really that rainy here, because people know it is and you can look it up, but they say, hey, yeah, it is rainy, you’re right, it is. Here’s how it changed, here’s what it means, though, here’s the value it brings to you if you come visit us. He talks, he has a whole long section called, ugly cats, boat shoes, and overpriced jewelry, the sheer illogic of pricing. And so I won’t get into all those specific examples, but he talks about the illogic of pricing, which I mentioned earlier little bit. It’s very frustrating to me. Should be the best product at the best price, wins, and it’s not how it is.
So a few examples he has in here is he says, 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. So he gives examples in the book of places where they actually doubled the price on a product without changing anything, and it sold way more because people thought it was more valuable. If your product is a tremendous value at a low price, people may say, that price is too low. Maybe it’s not any good. And so it’s an interesting balance of trying to figure that out. He says there’s the resistance principle. He says setting your price is like setting a screw.
A little resistance is a good sign. So if you’re driving a screw into some wood, if it just drops right in, that’s not gonna stay. But a little resistance is a good sign and pricing is the same. And then he says, avoiding the deadly middle, the quote from the book here says, quote, the premium service and low cost provider occupy nice niches all by themselves. If you are priced in between, however, you’re competing with almost everyone and that’s a lot of everyone’s. Beware of the deadly middle. And so yeah, if you’re…
know, continuum of services. There’s the premium one that’s the best one out there. They’re super expensive. Then there’s the super cheap one that if people have no money, they can get. And if you’re in the middle, like, what are you there for? People don’t have money. They’re going to go to the cheaper one. If they really want quality, they’re going to go up and you’re kind of stuck in the middle where most everyone else is to most businesses are in the middle. And that can be a dangerous place to be. You got to be careful with that. He gives a couple of lessons here. He has a pricing lesson from Picasso. You may have heard this little story before, but I’ll read it here. said, quote,
A woman was strolling along the street in Paris when she spotted Picasso sketching in a sidewalk cafe. Not so thrilled that she could not be slightly presumptuous, the woman asked Picasso if he might sketch her and charge accordingly. Picasso obliged. In just minutes there she was, an original Picasso. And what do I owe you, she asked. Five thousand francs, he answered. But it only took you three minutes, she politely reminded him. He said, no, it took me all my life. So Picasso, you know, the lesson here is don’t charge by the hour, charge by the years. You Picasso charged because
because he’s Picasso because of all the years he had. wasn’t, you took three minutes of some person’s time. You took someone that has devoted his life to this craft and did that. And then here’s another one that this one I’ve seen even more often online and stuff with different scenarios. But he says the carpenter corollary, there is carpenter corollary to the Picasso principle. He said, quote, a man was suffering a persistent problem with his house. The floor squeaked. No matter what he tried, nothing worked. Finally, he called a carpenter who friends said was a true craftsman. The craftsman walked in the room and heard the squeak.
He sat down his toolbox, pulled out a hammer and nail and pounded the nail into the floor with three blows. The squeak was gone forever. The carpenter pulled out an invoice slip in which he wrote the total of $45. Above that total were two line items. Hammering, $2, knowing where to hammer, $43. Charged for knowing where. This is something I see a lot with us. I’m sure you have your examples in your business, but for us, we can look at a website. If there’s a problem, we can usually identify it pretty quick, just we know where to hammer. We know that this plugin is causing issues or that Google changed things here like,
just by glancing at it, we know what’s going on, where I can’t do that for other things. You there’s people that could hear a noise coming from my car and immediately say, oh, I know what that is. I can’t, the noise is all sound like noise to me, but I pay them because they know where the noise is and what’s going on. You pay me because you know where website issues are. Like you pay this carpenter because he knows where to hammer. You where is that? should charge for knowing, charge for knowing where he says, um, later he talks about monogramming your shirts, not your company. So there’s a quote here. He says blame IBM.
IBM convinced executives that if they gave their company a fancy monogram like IBM, they would succeed like IBM. This is like thinking that Michael Jordan’s shoes will make you like Mike. It’s also like thinking that dinner causes midnight because midnight always comes after dinner. And so the idea here is IBM, people say IBM’s great and they have this monogram, this acronym, you know, like, cool, we’ll just do it like IBM and we’ll be great like IBM. IBM’s great because they were great for the timing they came to the market and for the things that Watson did over the years and just the way they built and they happen to have the name called IBM.
Copying the name IBM does not copy their success. Again, copying Michael Jordan’s shoes does not make you Mike. And you can’t say if I name like IBM, I’m going to be successful. It’s like dinner causes midnight because midnight comes after dinner. And that’s also obviously not true there either. So he gets a lot into naming. I agree with some of it, not with others, but it’s a good chapter to really make you think about how to name, how distinctive to be, how to stand out, don’t sound like all the others. He does a lot of great stuff with that. ⁓ Getting into that is kind of branding.
chapter called What Brands Do for Sales. He says, third, consider the plight of the typical non-branded service. To justify her choice of a non-branded service, the prospective client must often schedule follow-up presentations with the key people in her company or her spouse if it’s a consumer service. Frequently, a non-branded service will spend more on this lengthy selling process than the initial project is worth. Branded services rarely face that expense. In fact, prospects routinely choose brand name services virtually sight unseen, so brands take less time and less expense to sell.
So he says, make selling easier, faster and cheaper, build a brand. Of course, what it’s building a brand means, it’s not only the logo and the look of your company and the words you use and stuff, but also being out in the community and having advertising, just being well known out there. But if you’re well known out there, it can make the sales cycle that much easier. He says, stand by your brand, never underestimate the value of your brand or the difficulty in creating a new one. And so he shared a story there too with some people that with a well branded financial services firm. said, we’re better than this, we’re gonna start our own thing.
the ones that really did most of the work and they failed because the brand stood on its own and they didn’t have that brand, even though they had the quality and the price and all those things, they didn’t have that historic brand and can make a big difference, which again is frustrating in a lot of ways, but it’s, what it is. We have to accept what things are and go with it. I talks later as you’re selling, let’s see with communicating and selling says tricks are for kids. The quote here is 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’re willing to trick them and that tells your prospects that you’ll try to trick them again. No tricks. And I’ve seen this before and I’ve called companies out on this. We had a local car dealer that sent over this like fake check thing that may look like a check and then of course wasn’t, you know, wasn’t a check. ⁓ and like you’re trying to trick me in the initial conversation. So now I trust that you won’t do it again. Like absolutely not. If you’re going to try to trick me now, you’re going to try to trick me later. I don’t trust you. And so yeah, tricks are a bad idea because it’s going to end up poorly related. said,
If you think your promotional idea might seem silly or unprofessional, it is. And he shared some examples of just silly promotions and unprofessional things that would stand out and kind of get them known. yeah, it was silly and unprofessional and made them seem silly and unprofessional. So if you think your promotional idea might seem silly or unprofessional, it is. ⁓ Going a little further, he talks more about publicity and just kind of, again, to build that brand. said the value of publicity, he said get ink. I’m just going to give you the summary of these three chapters in a row here.
Next one is advertising is publicity said if you want publicity advertise and the next one is advertising begets publicity. If you want more publicity, do more advertising. He’s a big fan of advertising. Just to get your name out there. He shared stories of like a company he got, he used some PR and got them a nice article written in a magazine. But in that same magazine, he bought like two other ads too. And so people that saw that like, wow, you’ve got all this PR, you’re doing a great job. I saw the article and all that, but it’s not because his name kept popping up. The advertising helps support the publicity behind it, supported the article and can advertising can do a lot.
to kind of build your brand around it. He talks about focus on buying and not selling, make your services easy to buy. We’ve seen all those where you see something you want to buy and it’s complicated, you’re not sure how to do it, where to go, do you call, do you have options? If you make it complicated to buy, that’s a problem for any business really. Getting later, he talks about nurturing and keeping clients. He says the day after, while getting the business can be the first step in losing it, don’t raise expectations you cannot meet.
And this tends to be a problem in bigger companies, where the salespeople promises to make the sale, because their goal is to make the sale and not worry about what happens later, but then they can’t be met later. So you always got to be careful to not raise expectations too far. He talks about, I don’t have the note here, but he said something like, promise people something in the PM, deliver it in the AM. Always try to over underestimate and over deliver. Under promise and over deliver. And so he says, yeah, if you tell people, I’ll have it to you by tomorrow afternoon, knowing you can do it in the morning, and you get it in the morning.
they’re happy with it. Versus if you say, I’ll try to get it today and then you give it them tomorrow morning, they’ll be unhappy, even though delivered at the same time. It’s about setting expectations. He talks about that here. There’s a quote from the book here. says, quote, a customer satisfaction is the gap between what the customer expects and what she gets. Service below her expectations makes her dissatisfied. And the greater the gap, the greater her dissatisfaction. To manage satisfaction, must carefully manage your customer’s expectations. And so again,
It’s all about expectations. I say, I’m gonna have this to you tomorrow afternoon. I give it to you in the morning, you’re thrilled. If I say, I’ll have it to you today and I give it to you tomorrow morning, you’re disappointed. And again, it’s the same delivery. It’s just about how you set expectations. And then last, we’re gonna end on this piece here. There’s a section called, your patrons are saints. And I’ll read this last quote here. says, there’s no such thing as too often, too grateful, too warm or too appreciative. After all she’s been through, more than you know, you cannot thank your client too much. So he talks a lot about just giving thanks to your clients.
too much. You can’t do it too much. It’s always there. The last quote I’ll end on here says, your parents were right. Say thank you often. And so yeah, I’ll kind of leave it there for this one. But Selling the Invisible, fantastic older book, but yeah, it’s available on Kindle and all those things. And again, I like that it has 140 or whatever chapters because it’s nice to go through. And again, I could pull out the chapters that were highlights to me here. So I encourage you to give it a listen. Thanks so much.
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