Marketers Use These Tricks to Sell Services
In a world crowded with ads, The Invisible Promise offers marketing tricks to make some services stand out more than others.

It seems like everyone has a side gig. Many who launch side gigs offer services to others instead of creating products. Services have to be marketed a little differently than products, and there are specific tactics that may not pop up in “Marketing 101” articles.
Harry Beckwith’s book The Invisible Promise is a collection of these specific tactics. People can examine products before they buy them. Services can’t be examined in the same way. Beckwith starts his book with the solution to that problem.
Prove You Can Do It
When you’re selling a product, you have something physical to show a customer. But when someone comes to you about your service, you’re not just selling your service. You’re selling your ability to deliver your service when you eventually perform it. Beckwith summed it up nicely:
“The benefit that every service sells, in every category, is assurance — the assurance of knowing you can deliver on the promise — which, again, is all a service is at the time you sell it: a promise that at some future date, you will perform a certain task and achieve the outcome.”
Think about a contractor who does shower flooring. That contractor doesn’t have a shower to tile in front of customers. Instead, the contractor will have a portfolio of past work and customer reviews to prove the contractor can do the work.
But that’s only the first step in marketing a service. Refining that message is about playing on a customer’s fear, then alleviating it.
Use Fear to Make Sales
Even if you have a portfolio and customer testimonials, you still have to convince people that they’re making the right choice by choosing your service. Beckwith explained:
“…one thing we particularly dread is making a wrong decision. This is partly ego, of course; a poor choice makes us feel foolish. Tests have shown, as a vivid example, that if faced with the choice of two different makes of strawberry jam, you will choose one, but if given five choices, you won’t. You had only a 50 percent chance of making the wrong choice of the first but an 80 percent chance of the second. So you leave the store jamless.”
Service providers don’t necessarily have to worry about overwhelming their customers with choices. (Some do. Massage Envy has a long, dense list of massages, services, and add-ons.) However, service providers have to ensure that customers aren’t worried they’re making a mistake by committing to paying for a service that will be performed later.
That means not only thinking “about the benefit of working with you — but particularly the pain you can kill and the losses you can prevent.”
That means an effective pitch for a service could highlight what the customer is missing without your service and how your service could avoid a loss. A masseuse could point out how much family time a customer is missing from their distractingly sore muscles. That masseuse could offer a massage as a way to not only relieve muscle tension but also restore limited family time.
The Invisible Promise is a great resource for anyone interested in the particulars of service marketing. It’s also a great insight into the tricks that marketers will use to convince you to pay for a service.