Small Business Success

Customer Evangelism — When It Works, It Really Works!

I'm reading another very interesting book: Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force. The authors tell us something we've known for awhile, but perhaps haven't really taken full advantage of:

"The marketing world has changed dramatically since the advent of the 21st century. Technology has leveled the playing field to make quality less of a competitive difference. ...product and service levels have nearly evened out, as have price advantages. We're drowning in a sea of media and information overload. In a world with so much choice, how do people make decisions? By relying on trusted friends, colleagues, or family members."

The book goes on to show how various businesses of different sizes have expanded tremendously by the actions of their CUSTOMERS. Some of this we know of as "word-of-mouth." But in some cases, it went far beyond word-of-mouth to a "customer evangelism." In these cases, you have customers promoting the living daylights out of your business. They'll do it a variety of ways, but they are so in love with what you do and how well you treat them, they take customer loyalty to the max.

Are your customers going out of their way to promote you and your business? If not, whatever time you spend helping this activity along is time very well spent.

Good Clients and Bad Clients...

Now that's a bit of a strange title for a post. If a client is a client, then how could there be a "bad" client?

Perhaps using the adjective "bad" is not quite appropriate, but when you have a client that makes unreasonable demands on your time, who rarely follows the advice you provide, complains about a variety of things (most or all quite petty) and then doesn't pay on time, this is not a "high-quality" client.

This kind of client doesn't follow your advice because they have extremely "special" circumstances that need inordinate amounts of personal attention and even then, things just don't work out. At times like these, you may start doubting your ability to produce a good result. You decide to try even harder with this client, because you have a high level of integrity and you want everyone you work with to succeed.

Let me offer another viewpoint: this client (and others like him/her) are making it more and more difficult for you and your staff to deliver to others. Your time AND attention gets locked up in these apparent failures and you have less time AND attention to devote to other clients. I emphasize the word "attention" because that's exactly what happens. Business owners have just so much attention available in a given production day and when a good chunk of that attention is fixated on a very small number of people who are very difficult to work with, well, the bottom line suffers.

What would happen if you let those clients go, phased them out, perhaps even gave them their money back and then had all kinds of time and attention available to creating a more ideal client? You may find yourself with many more ideal clients than before. Ideal clients are clients you WANT to work with: they listen, they follow your advice, they pay on time, and yes, they want you to succeed too. More ideal clients not only add up to a more profitable activity, they also bring a breath of fresh air and sanity for you and your staff.

John Jantsch, in his new book Duct Tape Marketing: The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide, goes into this subject of an "ideal client" in much more detail.

I'm not advocating you just outright dismiss clients who are challenging to your business. I'm suggesting you look around and see if you have a handful of clients (customers, patients, etc.) who just take up way too much time and energy and therefore reduce your ability to promote and deliver to others. They also seem to drain the life out of you and/or your staff. If that's happening, then consider the option presented above. It just might work...

A Couple of Excellent Books

Two books I'd like to recommend:

Leadership by Rudy Giuliani

Mind Set! Reset Your Thinking and See the Future by John Naisbett

Rudy Giuliani of course was the Mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2002. And John Naisbett, you may recall, authored the bestselling "Megatrends" back in 1988.

There is a very interesting similarity in both of these books. In "Leadership", Giuliani details out how he accomplished significant positive change in New York City during his eight years as Mayor. Giuliani considers his implementation of an 'accountability system' an essential element in this positive change. To break this down to a very simple statement: virtually every department of city government was given a set of statistics. These stats were then plotted, analyzed and important management decisions were based on these stats.

When you make business decisions using statistics, you push aside rumor and opinion, both potential business destroyers.

John Naisbett's new book lays out eleven different "mindsets" that he believes give you the best chance of understanding current events and predicting what will happen in the future. Fascinating stuff. One of these mindsets he simply calls "Focus on the score of the game." And what he means by this is KNOW what the actual facts are in any given situation. Don't be swayed by hype or rumor and opinion. He gives a number of examples of how important events in our lives can (and have been) distorted and how this leads to making very bad decisions.

I heartily recommend both books. They both provide intriguing new perspectives on running a business of any size.