Getting Everything You Can Jay Abraham Book Review

Getting Everything You Can From Everything You've Got by Jay Abraham

Book Review 5 Stars

The full title of this Jay Abraham book (America's marketing superstar consultant and reputedly the highest paid marketing consultant in the world) is:

"Getting Everything You Can From Everything You've Got - 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition"

Jay Abraham is a major influence on my business coaching and this book is recommended to all my business coaching clients along with Michael Gerber's "E Myth Revisited".

I Didn't Like It At First

Strangely "Getting Everything You Can" was a book that when I first bought and tried to read it, I didn't like it at all.

Just as with "The E Myth Revisited", this Jay Abraham book is written from the practical, real world side rather than theory but unlike its title may suggest, it is not a "21 steps to take" style book.

My advice is to stick with this Jay Abraham book or make sure you come back to it.

The key messages are profound

The key issue for me about Jay Abraham's life work (and I have built up an impressive amount of material) is that it is about a mindset.

In particular it is about the importance of having what I think of as an "opportunity - possibility" mindset.

If you just look around and connect the dots you will see opportunities and possibilities. And if you see them you have a decision to make - are you going to act, are you going to procrastinate or are you going to reject the idea?

What is in Getting Everything You Can

Let's have a look at the contents of this Jay Abraham book which covers the following issues:

1. The 3 ways to grow any business
   This Jay Abraham idea has been adopted and adapted by other people but the simple power of the formula is still remarkable because so much effort is focused on the first way at the expense of the other two.
    
   There are only 3 ways to grow - sell to more customers, increase the transaction value and increase the number of times a customer buys. Simple. Obvious. But do you have strategies for growing each element. Many people don't.
    
2. The opportunity mindset
   Jay Abraham tells the story of a young boy who found a coin on the pavement and was so thrilled by the discovering that he carried on searching for dropped coins all his life.
      
   Yes he found a small amount of money but he missed so many opportunities to make a fortune. The simple advice is to keep your head up, your eyes open and your mind in gear.
    
3. Assess your business strengths
   Just stand back and take a good hard look at your business. You can't work out how to get to where you want to be without knowing where you are at the moment. Again simple and a cornerstone of my own coaching but it works so well.
   
   To help you understand the concept, let's move a problem to geography - how do you get to London? It depends on where you are.
    
4. The strategy of pre-eminence
   This is really powerful concept of Jay Abraham that I believe in wholeheartedly. Success comes if you put your clients needs ahead of your own. Act in their best interests and take the high ground. Your customers and prospects will see the difference and reward you. Why? Because you are listening to them and what they really want and need.
            
5. Calculate the lifetime value of your customers and the marginal net worth (lifetime value less the costs of acquisition).
   It will give you a new way to look at your customer acquisition process, your client retention strategies and give you renewed enthusiasm for increasing the other two ways of growing your business. Focus on this lifetime value is a major cause of Jay Abraham's success since he specialises in making established businesses more profitable.
            
6. Develop and communicate a clear Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Easy to say but hard to do. Jay Abraham gives you examples and advice but I find the biggest stumbling block for business owners is that it means making decisions and choices.
    
   It means focusing on a particular type of customer and targeting them precisely rather than trying to appeal to the general market. It's the difference between piping hot home made chicken soup and luke warm soup of the day.
                  
7. Pre-emptive marketing
   Jay reminds us about the about the Claude Hopkins and Schlitz beer story from the 1920s.
    
   A struggling small beer maker was able to move to the number 1 position by explaining in detail all the care attention that went into making the beer.
    
   "But we all do it like that" said the Schlitz management - "Yes but the public don't know that" replied Claude Hopkins.
   
   This is a classic piece of educational marketing that shows that people can't value something they don't know or understand and the principles could apply to your business.
                  
8. Risk free offers and even more compelling, better than risk free offers.
   Why would anyone do this? Because if your customer carries the risk, they will be nervous about committing.
    
   Your customers don't know how good you are but you do. You can accept that risk far more cheaply and easily than they can.
               
9. Up-selling and cross-selling
   In this chapter Jay Abraham explains how to take a customer's original proposed purchase and then persuade them to upgrade to a more expensive version (an up-sell) or encouraging them to buy something else to go with it (a cross-sell.)
    
   Just don't do it because it makes you more money (it will) but because it is in the customer's best interests because they get what they really want.
   
   Haven't you bought something only to learn later that you should have spent a little more to get some key benefits you hadn't understood about before?
                  
10. Test everything
    Sound advice when you realise that even the best, most experienced marketers and copywriters can get remarkably different results from just changing a headline.
     
    If the top professionals get surprises (nobody tests against something the don't think will work) the rest of us need to learn to test again and again and again...
                   
11. Build on your relationships to bring you more customers and more products. Jay Abraham calls this host-beneficiary relationships while Guerrilla Marketers know this as fusion marketing.
                
12. Systematised referral processes
    Prospects from referrals buy more and buy more easily but do you have a process. Jay Abraham has identified 93 referral systems in a Nightingale Conant audio programme.
              
13. Recovering business from inactive clients
    People stop buying for many reasons but many can be easily recovered if you show that you have noticed and that you care.
              
14. Making sales letters pay
    Almost anything can be sold using direct mail and in this chapter Jay gives tips on how to make your letters more effective.
                   
15. Mastering the art of getting clients over the telephone.
             
16. How to sell on the Internet
    The book was published in 2000 so some elements of this chapter are out of date but it still contains sound advice.
             
17. Creating wealth without any money
    How can you do that? By using barter to make the deal. If you do this, I will do that. It is a simple process for two people although it does get more complicated with three people involved.
             
18. Keep in contact with your customers
    The more you see them as friends, the closer the bond and the more likely they will keep buying.
             
19. Using goals as the engine of success.
    Every coach talks about goals? Well they are important and they have been shown to work.
           
20. Keep improving
    Aim to get the most out of everything you do and keep learning.
           
21. Find your own unique definition of success
    Look closely and you will find that you have key skills, capabilities, knowledge and relationships that people will value.
     
    Jay Abraham goes into this in much more detail in another Nightingale Conant audio called Your Secret Wealth.

Assessment of Getting Everything You Can

"Getting Everything You Can Out Of Everything You've Got" is an excellent introduction to Jay Abraham's thinking and you can buy this Jay Abraham book from  Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

Other ways to get this Jay Abraham book

I am a Jay Abraham fanatic but I know that some people can't absorb long books.

If you like the sound of this book but you don't think that you will have the time to read it then I would like to introduce you to a book summary service that does the work for you by producing 8 to 12 page summaries of the best and most popular business books - Business Summaries

Have you read this Jay Abraham book?

If so, I'd love to read your opinion of "Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got" by Jay Abraham.

I strongly recommend that you introduce yourself to the thinking and the work of Jay Abraham. He has proven again and again in a wide range of businesses and industries just how much extra profit his methods can generate.

Don't miss the opportunity to download a free 35 page Jay Abraham PDF called the Windfall Profits Paradox   

Comments

[Bob Meyer]

Jay Abraham has done some remarkable things and is a big believer in barter. As the publisher of BarterNews since 1980 I am well aware of his many accomplishments.

[Bob Meyer]

Jay Abraham has done some remarkable things and is a big believer in barter. As the publisher of BarterNews since 1980 I am well aware of his many accomplishments.

[JohnB]

I'm a major fan of Jay. It's a good summary of his book. I would also add...

-Anyone can search around the internet for his papers, pdfs, interviews. I just type different terms into different search engines every few weeks. Definitely study all his letters.

-As powerful as his concepts are, hearing him via audio is 100x better than print. His Tony Robbins interview is great, I've probably listened to it 10-15 times.

[Paul Simister]

Hi JohnB
Thanks for the comment. keep coming back to the site because it will feature lots of Jay Abraham inspired blogs.

I certainly agree with you about reading the Jay Abraham sales letters to learn how to move people to action.

I also agree that Jay is interesting to hear on audio although the sheer pace and variety of thoughts can become overwhelming. Again I will be reviewing the Nightingale Conant audios bu Jay Abraham that are easily available and a few others that will be more challenging.

[JohnB]

On audio, he can be overwhelming. He doesn't waste any time or space sharing information, so there's alot to digest.

His mindset is amazing. He reduces everything down to a core simplicity and you can see how powerful small changes are..i.e..his headline example.."gold is selling for $300 an ounce".

Or the 3 ways to grow a business model. Such a slight shift from..always focusing on only growing more customers.

I'll check out your future posts.

[Jason]

I'm currently reading this book from Jay, sometimes he seems to be too confidence with his approach, but you just can't deny that it works.

It works as it was spelled, Jay Abraham has always emphasize on mindset, the winning "opportunity" mindset which always seeks for a better approach to create breakthrough.

My reading goes very slow as every story in this book will make you think and think... until you see some light out of it.

I'm going to share more about my reading in my blog, feel free to drop me some message.

I'm a marketing new comer.

[Mike]

Here's how I think abraham is a marketing genius. He wrote a book that you can buy at Amazon for almost nothing.

He takes the same material recycles it puts a new name on it turns it into seminars that he charges $25,000 for and tapes and works books ($5000) with no more information that is in the book.

Then he takes each of those courses and seminars and recycles the material over and over changing the name of each course charging his raving fans thousands of dollars over and over again. Man I can’t wait to give him more money! What an honor.

Now that my friend is true genius!

But here’s the best part, most of the high priced guru’s material can be purchased on ebay for pennies on the dollar, but not abraham. He licenses his material and prohibits the resale of it.

They need to make a bud light commercial about him in their “True man of Genius” series!
!