The main thrust is that effective services marketers focus on building relationships, rather than selling features and benefits:

In most professional services, you are 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. Before you try to satisfy "the client," understand and satisfy the person.

One way to satisfy the person is to "study every point at which your company makes contact with a prospect. Then ask: What are we doing to make a phenomenal impression at every point?"

A central message that might not sound appealing to lawyers who are averse to big changes: Incredibly successful marketers like H&R Block, Charles Schwab, and Hyatt Legal Services "did not simply improve incrementally on existing ideas. They made radical departures."

Beckwith's First Rule of Marketing Planning: "Everyone should start at ground zero. They should ask, 'Is [the service we offer] viable anymore? Is this what the world wants?'"

On the other hand, "Don't just create what the market needs or wants. Create what it would love."

Beckwith devotes most of the book to the planning, research, and techniques needed to build and reinforce your relationships with clients. Some of his best stuff includes:

• Creating a positioning statement (15 pages on this)

• Branding (20 pages)

• Conveying the message of quality: "Create the evidence of your service quality. Then communicate it. Make the invisible visible."

• Improving your conversation skills: "You cannot bore someone into buying your product."

Here's something you might agree with wholeheartedly, after seeing so many lame mission statements posted on law firm websites: "Write a mission statement, but keep it private."

Not all his insight, opinions and advice are on target, so you have to read skeptically and critically. The choppy, short-chapter format is distracting. But it makes for great bathroom reading.

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David M. Freedman, director
Law Marketing Bibliography
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