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Overview of The Invisible Touch by Harry Beckwith
 
Is the software that you sell to your customers a product or a service? Your customers can't touch it. They expect you to improve it and deliver additional functionality for years and years to come. Delivering software sounds a bit like a service to me.
Beckwith's book covers the ways service providers need to deal with price, brand, packaging, and relationships. And while a lot of the material is written for accountants and financial planners, it's easy to translate his principles into the world of the software developer.
For example, successful developers have to address much more than the quality of their applications. They have to think about their web sites, support systems, documentation, and dozens of other things that affect the customers' experiences.
How Can Harry Beckwith's The Invisible Touch help software developers?
Beckwith does not believe that market research works very well. "People who know that they are being studied change what they do." People won't understand complex or innovative ideas immediately, and research will say, incorrectly, that such ideas won't sell. Trust your tummy, not what people tell you.
The book discusses a dozen fallacies of marketing, and explains the work-arounds. He argues against bundling and cross-selling. While I don't agree with his argument, I'm glad I read it because I can structure bundles and cross-sells that don't fall into the traps that he warns us about. As is usually the case, I learn more from ideas that I disagree with than from those that immediately make sense to me.
Most software developers try to distinguish themselves from their competitors by including unique features and functionality in their applications. Beckwith urges us to create an inventory of our points of contact with our prospects and customers, and find ways to make each of them extraordinary. It's easy to find software categories with hundreds of developers offering users nearly identical functionality. In my experience, the unsuccessful software developers within a category are offering tech solutions, while the winners have packaged similar software as business solutions. It's all in the marketing.
In the final two-thirds of the book, Beckwith gives detailed advice on how to deal with price, branding, packaging, and relationships. These concepts apply just as much to software developers as they do to the service providers who are the target of his book.
Should software authors read The Invisible Touch?
This is a quick read, with tons of useful information. I strongly recommend it.
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Press releases give buyers a chance to consider your software.
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Don't personalize the press releases that you send to the magazines and newspapers.
It's unprofessional.
The editors know that even the simplest email client supports email-merges, and they're really not impressed by a "Dear Sally:" salutation.
Talk to a pro, and send your press release in the format that editors will respect.
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Each issue of Al Harberg's Software Marketing Newsletter contains about five printed pages of usable, hard-hitting information that is designed with only one purpose in mind: to increase your software sales.
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Buy the book from amazon.com
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