Chapter 5 - The Benefits of Intangibles
The author tells a story that, in an oblique and roundabout way, suggests that many salesmen fear selling services because the product is intangible. When selling physical merchandise there is an item involved, tangible evidence that you're selling something real.
To the earlier point, a service entails a promise. Essentially, it's a promise that people in your company will do things that will be beneficial to the customer. There's nothing they can see right now, and no benefit they will gain when they sign the contract - all of that will happen later, when the service is performed as promised.
One way the author suggests of making a service "real" is to express it in dollars and cents. If you can price your service against a more expensive way of accomplishing the same goal, you will get their attention. This should be fairly easy for salesmen in business-to-business to understand: when you are offering to do something they already do, but do it more cheaply, the allure is clear. When you are offering to do something they do not already do, you have to connect the results of doing it to an increase in revenue or a decrease in expenses compared to not doing it at all.
For some services, the benefit is not as closely tied to finances. Consider the value of a cleaning service: from a functional perspective, there is no clear relation to the costs and revenues of producing their own product. Your hook for this particular service is suggesting the consequences of having a dirty or untidy office: the negative impression it will make on clients will cause them to lose business, health and safety risk to employees is a legal risk, and so on.
If you cannot imagine (or substantiate) the benefits to the prospect, speak to the benefits you've provided for other clients. Testimonials that claim specific and measurable benefits are more influential than rave reviews that are not supported by any specific benefit.
Ultimately, selling a service is about making a promise about benefits the prospect will receive in the future, and gaining his confidence that you will make good on this promise - bot h in terms of performing the work and achieving the promised outcomes.
(EN: The author doesn't quite seem to grasp that everything he's said about services is also true of products. The customer is looking for a solution to the problem or the satisfaction of a need, so even when there is a physical object involved, it's just a McGuffin. That is, whether you're selling cleaning suppliers or a cleaning service, the benefit the customer is paying for is a clean environment, however it is delivered, and having a physical item does not exempt you from having to make and keep promises about the benefit they will deliver.)