When Harry Met Christine
Harry Beckwith and Christine Clifford Beckwith are marriage partners and business partners. Together, they run Beckwith Partners, serving the service industry with clients ranging from boutique professional firms and venture-capitalized startups to over 35 Fortune 500 companies.

Harry’s book, Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing, was named one of the top ten business and management books of all time. His second and third books, Invisible Touch: The Four Keys to Modern Marketing, and What Clients Love: A Field Guide to Growing Your Business, brought his total sales worldwide to over 700,000 copies in 23 languages.

Christine’s a longtime sales and marketing executive, who directed accounts including Target, Toys’R’Us, Wal-Mart, Mattel Toys and Revlon; led her company to over $54 million in annual sales; and signed the industry’s record account with Procter & Gamble. Christine, also CEO/President/Founder of The Cancer Club, remains cancer-free a dozen years after her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Teaming Up on Life Lessons
The Beckwiths teamed up to write You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourselfthat “provide tips, anecdotes, and insights based on their 30 years of selling experience. Written in a traditional homespun style, the Beckwiths offer doses of humor and practical knowledge to anyone who wants to learn how to seal the deal and thrive in business.”

Their humor comes out when they discuss You, Inc. If you’re thinking about writing a business book with your significant other, then Harry and Christine urge you to contact them. “Giving birth to a book reminds us of James Simon Kunen’s quote. ‘Writing a book is like having a baby. Both bring something new into the world, and both are a pain in the @&*. Writing a book hurts.’ Creating You, Inc wasn’t as fun as conceiving a child, but we do see this similarity: you feel such love, and such pride, for the tiny thing that finally comes out, almost a year later,” Harry recently commented on You, Inc.

SmartLemming.com interviewed the Beckwiths on their new book, the biggest mistake we make in selling ourselves, and why we don’t need a mentor, among other life lessons.

SMART LEMMING: In the intro of your book, the reader learns that You, Inc. originally started out as three books: How to Make a $1 Million in Sales ($3 Million Before Taxes) as Christine’s first book, Seat Belts and Twin Airbags by Harry as life lessons for your sons, and Who Moved My Salad Fork? covering manners also by Harry. Why the change? Was it hard to condense all those sales, business, and life lesson into one book?
HARRY & CHRISTINE: Writing a book is always hard, especially if you write it in modules, as we did. You have to be careful to avoid repetition, and it’s easy to think you’ve written something already–or not–and be wrong.

That said, all the books had a common idea: How do you thrive in business and in life? It involves selling yourself and acting respectfully to others. So the ideas combine easily–and the ones that don’t get thrown out. And it’s always good to throw out 20% of your material, and 95% of the words you originally used to convey your ideas.

SL: What’s the biggest mistake people make in selling themselves?
H&C: Our weaknesses in communicating clearly, and our assumption that we do, are the worst problem in marketing, sales, communication–and perhaps even life itself–today.

Another mistake that stands out, although it isn’t the most common, is believing that people can be fooled. People have sensitive antennae for that.

Women too often underestimate themselves, fear success, worry that maybe they’re not really that good. As a general proposition, you can say that men make the mistake of having too much confidence, and women too little.

SL: You write that we don’t need mentors, which flies in the face of conventional wisdom. How did you come to this conclusion?
H&C: The fallacy is in choosing just one mentor. You don’t want a mentor; you want to look to many people for advice and suggestions. The best mentors are right 85% of the time. You want better than that.

SL: Most people believe that “you are who are you,” but you’re saying that, in sales and marketing, “you are who you appear to be.” In your experience, is there a big difference between the two for most people?
H&C: Yes, you are who you are, but there’s no assurance someone will see who you are. Instead, we see through our veil of prejudices and stereotypes. If you’re a North Dakota farmer, anyone speaking to you will be certain you have never read the New Yorker or know the difference between a béarnaise and a hollandaise. If you live in New York City, they will assume you’ve never chewed tobacco or watched a NASCAR race. If you’re an accountant, you’re precise but not funny and perhaps even humorless. And on, and on. You need to defeat the likely stereotype others have of you. Harry has surfer hair, so most people assume he is very laid-back and probably smoked grass as a kid–if not now, too.

SL: Is the skill of good listening declining because there are so many distractions like Blackberries, iPods, and cell phones? Is it getting harder for people to be good listeners?
H&C: There is some evidence that as a culture, we are acquiring a society-wide case of attention deficit disorder. So much screams for our attention, and our brains aren’t ready for it. Imagine us living in caves thousands of years ago. What screamed for your attention? Mostly your stomach. Maybe occasionally a rival tribe planned an invasion, and you had to be sensitive to the warning signals. Today, we are enveloped in messages, barraged with emails, inundated with ads and commercials. Words, noise, more words and noise, it all reaches toward delirium. We received two emails today, one from a person we had emailed six days ago with just what he’d hoped to receive–he missed it completely. The other person was thrilled by the email, but had ignored it for a month because he assumed it was just a routine posting of the Beckwith Partners newsletter. Two cases of attention deficits–two of ten million.

SL: Are we becoming too dependent on technological aids in selling ourselves?
H&C: You are selling yourself, not your ability to create a multi-slide presentation with cross fades and dissolves—unless, of course, that actually is what you sell. You are selling yourself, and every minute I– as your prospect–spend reading a screen–and trying to read it while you speak simultaneously–is time away from looking at you and deciding, “I like you, I trust you, I feel comfortable with you, I want to do business with you.” The only slides you need are those that convey something you cannot describe in words. If you’re selling architecture, by all means show them your previous work or your ideas for this one.

If you use visual aids, put visuals in them–and words aren’t visuals.

SL: You write that predictability is important. How does this track with people wanting to stand out? Some people might think that keeping others on their toes or keeping people guessing is better than having predictable behavior.
H&C: Woody Allen was right. 90% of success is showing up–to which we’d add, “prepared and on time.” We assume others want spectacular work or utter greatness, but what they really want is something that is predictably, reliably positively good. We don’t trust claims of superiority anyway, but we know when something is consistently good, and our inherent conservatism biases us to things that perform consistently well.

We mean predictability of behavior, consistency in how you serve someone. Predictable communications? Avoid them. Surprise is the communicator’s best weapon. The best stories, the best jokes, the best names–all have an element of surprise. Microsoft is a workable name for a company; Red Pepper is a brilliant and surprising one.

SL: What has the response been to your book? Anything about the response that has surprised you?
H&C: Wonderful. We’ve seen about 25 reviews and the weakest one was “I will read it again and I’m sure everyone who buys it will, too.” One reader called it UNBELIEVABLE–actually put it in all capitals. That surprised us; we’d never heard that before. Another reader said that what really stood out in the book was “the voice”, and what he heard was something genuine, two people speaking from the heart and not with a primary goal of trying to push a lot of books. Of course, an author might worry about that–what, it doesn’t sound like something that would be popular?–but we don’t.

SL: What are you two working on now?
H&C: Christine is writing a book about her life. That sounds a bit grand, to be sure–the autobiography of someone few people know. But it won’t be that. The book is a series of wonderful stories, most of them funny and some rolling-on-the-floor-laughing-your-A-off funny. In the end, there is a very inspirational message because it’s a story of laughing in the face of crisis and taking lemons and making a lemonade stand. We think it will be very entertaining, and that if there’s an annual Award for Best Chapter Titles, Book, she’ll at least be invited to New York for the ceremony.

Harry is too busy with clients to have time to write, other than two monthly articles for the Beckwith Partners newsletter. He’s seeing so many errors in communicating by clients–illegible logos, sales websites that look and read like corporate brochures–that he’s having trouble keeping up. But it’s comforting, too, knowing that you can help others, and the more overcommunicated our culture becomes, the more the opportunities for people who can simplify and clarify. Today, cutting through the clutter means cutting out your own clutter first.

Harry Beckwith and Christine Clifford Beckwith Additional Resources and Information

• Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing
• Invisible Touch: The Four Keys to Modern Marketing
• What Clients Love: A Field Guide to Growing Your Business
• You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself
• How to Speak Like a Pro article
• How Do Brands Work? article
• Invisible Ink newsletter sign-up
• “Marketing veterans are a dynamic duo - Harry and Christine Clifford Beckwith turned marriage into a thriving business partnership” by Dick Youngblood, Star Tribune
• The Cancer Club, the world’s leading source of gifts and inspiration for people dealing with cancer

Updated 5-08-2007: Related Posts

• “You, Inc. by Harry Beckwith and Christine Clifford Beckwith,” 800-CEO-Read Excerpts
• “Book Review: You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself by Harry and Christine (Clifford) Beckwith” by Adam Jusko
• “You need to read You, Inc!” by Drew, Marketing Minute
• “Book review of You Inc.” by Sandy Amazeen, MonstersandCritics.com

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