Customer Reviews

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition

5 star:		(121)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Actually, this is a two-books-in-one volume: an insightful explanation of how to increase personal as well as professional development, and, an uncommonly useful book on marketing. Rating either, I would give it Four Stars. Ranking the combination, I rate it higher. Abraham promises to provide "21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition." He delivers on that promise. If fully understood and properly applied, the 21 "ways" (actually strategies) will help almost everyone to become a better person as well as to increase the value of what they produce; perhaps indirectly but significantly, their business associates as well as family members can also be among the beneficiaries.

Abraham organizes his material within 21 chapters. Correctly, he first addresses the need for a plan ("Where You're Headed -- an Overview of Your Journey") and then the need for the proper attitude to ensure the success of that plan ("You Can Become Unbeatable"). By the final chapter, he has prepared his reader to understand what he calls a "unique definition of success." Specifically, "something I call optimum personal, business, and career strategy. What's this mean? It means that you must refuse to get less out of an effort, less out of an opportunity, less out of a day, less out of a dollar, less out of a relationship, than the maximum that activity or action has the capacity to give. It means that you don't do things just to be doing them. That you insist on playing life to the fullest. But playing it based on your sense of value."...You [first] have to figure out who you are and what it is you want."

Obviously, Abraham cannot figure out who you are but the 21 "ways" he shares can help you to make that determination. He cannot tell you what it is you want but the same 21 "ways" can help you to make that determination, also. Who will derive the greatest benefit from this book? One candidate would be the recent graduate for whom this would be an especially valuable holiday gift. Also, your less-experienced business associates who seem to lack a sense of purpose and/or direction in their lives, jobs, and careers. Finally, just about anyone else for whom most of what Abraham suggests seems "obvious" but would benefit from the human equivalent of a vehicle's 60,000-mile check-up. Abraham knows a lot. He has street smarts. Also passion, conviction, and a remarkable amount of empathy.

Years ago, Woody Allen once suggested that 80% of success is "showing up." For many people, Abraham suggests the other 20%: Knowing who you are and then being that person...knowing what you want and then pursuing it with energy and integrity. His use of the "journey" metaphor is apt. All successful journeys begin with the right "map" and resources, applied with precision and determination. If you are both willing and eager to begin your own "journey", I highly recommend Abraham as a companion.

Don't let Jay Abraham's title fool you. It may sound like just another "me generation" appeal to greed, but a careful reading will reverse that impression. What Abraham stresses throughout this helpful marketing book is that you must earn your rewards through serving others. What you have to sell (whether a product, an idea, or a service) must fill a genuine human need. You will earn the loyalty of clients only if you sincerely care about satisfying their needs. From the numerous success stories in this book, we can believe that Abraham has helped more than 10,000 businesses, large and small, to recognize overlooked opportunities and capitalize on them. His preference for the term "client" rather than "customer" sets the tone. Customers are people who buy from you. But clients are those for whom you provide some guidance or who are under your protection. Think of yourself as serving your clients, he says, helping them make the decision that will be most satisfactory to them, so that they will come back again. Much of Jay Abraham's advice has the ring of the tried-and-true, those fundamentals of marketing that have applied to human transactions from the beginnings of barter and trade. As always, you must offer quality and value, deal honestly, and back up the claims you make for your product. In today's world, you must also function efficiently, find your market niche, and test your advertising concepts (he tells you exactly how). You must maintain a reliable database of clients and contact them periodically to discover their changing needs. Abraham offers sound strategies for obtaining referrals, maximizing your advertising dollars, and writing appealing advertising copy. But many of Abraham's ideas are imaginative, and he encourages imagination in promoting your company and its products. He cautions against departing too radically from the promotional strategies that have worked well, yet there is also a need for original and fresh approaches. E-commerce, says Abraham, follows basic marketing principles within a new medium. He discusses the unique advantages of Internet marketing, showing respect and familiarity with the milieu of Cyberspace, while suggesting sensible precautions to avoid wasting your time and money. This section alone is worth the price of the book.

Helen Heightsman Gordon, Reviewer

This has got to be one of the best books on marketing that I've read in a long while. You find yourself sitting back and re-examining your entire business process and easily coming up with ways to attract NEW business from your existing customer or client base.

I easily came up with three full pages of new services to offer my existing clients. Jay is big on creating a Unique Selling Point. The lightbulb went off in my head as soon as I read about his. Putting these ideas into action can be done by anyone.

These services were just sitting here waiting to be discovered -- and I never would have found them without Jay's book. No matter what your business, you will be able to use the ideas in Jay's book. They are broad enough that you can capture the concept and mold it to the way that you do business.

Jay also has a set of tapes on this concept which I strongly recommend. His web site (abraham) has a good preview of his methodology and concepts as well.

This is a practioner's book. Jay Abraham is a hands-on consultant and this is the kind of advice you would get if he were consulting for you.

Let me briefly summarize. Your success relates to putting your client's interests ahead of your own. He uses the word client rather than customer to reflect that you should be looking out for the client's best interests, not just trying to make the sale.

His fundamental thinking builds around the formula that your annual revenues are a function of how many clients you have times the average sale you make to a client times the number of times clients buy from you in a year. The book goes on to look at ways to build each of those three elements, pointing out that increasing each of them creates geometrically higher growth rates than the increase in any one of them individually.

Here are the key elements:

(1) Spend your time working on breakthroughs (44 of 60 major ones studied came from ordinary people, not big companies)

(2) Build from your strengths (50 questions will help you identify them)

(3) Continuously convey your desire to put client's interests first compassionately, respectfully and loyally.

(4) Make it less risky and easier to buy from you (more than a money-back guarantee is suggested, if that is affordable) In fact, the book comes with a money-back guarantee from Martin Edelston.

(5) Develop and improve your Unique Selling Proposition (what can you uniquely deliver that people want and need?)

(6) Give them an offer that no one would ever refuse (this might mean a more than money-back guarantee and tremendous commissions for your sales people)

(7) Sell them what else they need after they buy the first item or service

(8) Use small, inexpensive tests to locate the fastest cheapest, ways to sell.

(9) Develop alliances with others who will lead business to you.

(10) Help your clients learn how to refer business to you.

(11) Use direct mail, e-mails, your Web site, and telemarketing to extend the awareness of what you do inexpensively.

(12) Focus on your highest potential prospects.

(13) Use barter.

(14) Set and surpass your goals, then reset and surpass them again.

(15) You have more knowledge, skill and resource advantages than you are using. In many cases, these are worth more than financial resources in making you more successful.

These simple concepts are displayed in 21 chapters along with some actions steps at the end to get you started, and some examples along the way (about 10 per chapter).

As you can see, many of these points require enormous elaboration in order to be well executed. No one ever learned to be great at direct mail or the Internet in 10 pages. So think of the book as an outline of what you need to learn, rather than the answers for how to get there.

Mr. Abraham's principles and concepts seem to be sound. They have been taught in marketing classes in business schools for decades. What is new here is creating a version of these principles and concepts in one book for those with no formal business training. This book is a lot cheaper than the tuition for a business school marketing course, and probably a little more practical for what you will have to do tomorrow in your business.

My main caution about the book is that the magic is in the relationships. The techniques will not work well unless you genuinely want to serve others ahead of your own interests. My experience has been that most people are the other way. They want customers rather than clients, because they don't want to be responsible for the customer's interests being served. Be sure you know how you feel about this point before starting to apply this advice.

Good luck in establishing richer relationships!

What I like about this book is that it helps to spark ideas, it covers a good range of marketing topics and it's written to be applied. My complaint is that it is too anecdotal which makes the book longer than it needs to be. That being said, the author gives a preview at the beginning of each chapter and provides action steps at the end. My suggestion to a prospective buyer is to first read the previews and action steps to determine whether the book will be useful for your needs. Some of the reviews have stated that the content in the book is not new or that it is to simple. I suspect that those with a background in marketing might find the material redundant. The book will probably be more useful for non-marketing types. As for the content being too simple, I'm from the school of thought that business is based on simple concepts and should be explained in that manner.

The best way to use the book is to read through for ideas and consult other books, the internet and/or people for specific help. For example, Chapter 6 discusses the importance of a unique selling proposition(USP). I would read the chapter, jot down ideas from the book, then look for resources that deal specifically with developing a USP.

Hope this review is helpful.

There is really only one word I can use to describe Jay Abraham's new book, "Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got" ... Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Jay Abraham is truly the ultimate marketing genuis in today's business world and his new book is a MUST for any business that wants to stay ahead ot the pack and achieve HIGH PERFORMANCE SUCCESS in the year 2000.

During my 25+ years as a business consultant, I have read hundreds of business books. There is not one book that comes close to impacting and exciting me to the magnitude that yours has. It has crystallized my thinking about how to move my business to the next level ... transformed how I approach my clients .... and revolutionized how I leverage my most important assets - my time, talents and money - for maximum results.

As a long-time student of your marketing programs and trainings, I have to say that you have truly out done yourself in this highly provocative, content-rich, mind expansive published "gem". Your current book brings to "life" - in a very hands-on, pragmatic terms - your principles, philosophies and strategies which have set you apart as one of the greatest marketing consultants and progressive thinkers in todays business world. The hundreds of powerful case studies and examples ... the many blueprints and templates for implementing such strategies .... the step-by-step action plans at the end of every chapter are just a few examples of what makes this book an absolute gold mine for any business leader or owner who wants to geometrically explode their business.

"Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got" is an truly an extraordinary masterpiece of marketing wisdom for any business ready to achieve high performance positioning in the New Millennium.

I have been lucky enough, in the past few years, to review a number of books in my newsletter. While there are many helpful business books published every year, Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got is a fantastic one volume guide that should be the first acquisition of the new millennium for anyone interested in business or in making money. Jay has, in one easy-to-read book, synthesized his lessons and ideas that can turn ideas into wealth. In this new global, technology-driven world, the tips in this book will help the reader better understand and identify ways to profit. That's the beauty of Jay's philosophy - he not only teaches you new concepts, he also instructs you on how to identify opportunities before others. This skill has helped me succeed and will help anyone take this new economy by storm. The chapter on selling on the internet is especially chock-full of incredibly profitable tips that can help you "dot-com" your way to real wealth.

If you've been burned before when you bought a how-to book from some "world renowned" expert and found nothing but 350 pages of buzzwords and bizspeak that wouldn't help you if you had a Phd, then you'd probably pass this gem right on by. And that would be a huge mistake.

BUT THIS BOOK! Why? Because Jay Abraham has managed to do something I've not seen before -- he has taken his marketplace-tested strategies and tactics for success and has translated them so that anyone can easily understand how to apply them to his/her own business or job.

What you'll learn from this book is stunning in its simplicity. Once you read the book you'll probably slap your forehead and mutter "why didn't I think of that?" That's Jay's genius. He knows how to focus on what is right in front of him and use it. We all have the ability to do what Jay has done so successfully for himself and his clients. But most of us haven't. We tend to discount or completely ignore our own talents and tools and never bring them to bear 100%. This book shows us how to use our abilities. No shortcuts. Lots of hard work. But the steps are made clear. We just have to have the drive to follow them.

I say again, BUY THIS BOOK!

Then, READ THIS BOOK!

Stuart M. Hardman, Senior Vice President, Grey Advertising/Los Angeles

Mr. Abraham's message can be distilled into 3 things: 1) get more customers, 2) get them to buy more, and 3) get them to buy more often.

The book spends the rest of the time telling stories around these themes. I've attended his seminar, bought his tapes, and also have this book. Personally, I wished that he used "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" as his book model instead of "Awaken the Giant Within."

This is one of those books that you know has lots of stuff in it, but you get bogged down in it, it's no fun reading it, and it sits there on your shelf.

Memo to Mr. Abrahams: We know you're America's #1 Marketing Wizard. Please get someone to help you rewrite this book. It's too hard a pill to shallow.

When I started reading "Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got," I immediately recognized the material as Jay's usual "nothing held back, full value" directional advice. I had become too focused on several projects. After reading the book, I realized how poorly I was planning one project and that another didn't make sense for the "Multiply Your Maximum" strategies described in detail in the book. Talk about cutting the learning curve, this book just saved us thousands of dollars, and months of work.

The single most dramatic change in my business life came from this books recommendations. When I identified my personal and business "unique selling proposition I immediately began to focus on my value centered objectives and profits soared!" As I read the book, I realized that the fundamentals always remain the same but the positioning and strategies need to constantly change. The excitement and energy is flowing through me. I am discovering so much opportunity that I had overlooked just by revisiting the fundamentals that are shared in the book.

I could go on forever. I will say that although I have used the strategy outlined in chapter ten about host-beneficiary relationships, I had only stumbled upon the concept. After reading the chapter I can see that a few simple changes in my current strategy will pay big dividends. I expect to double my business in the next 12 months on this principle alone.