How to Get Your Customer Evangelists to Sell for You - Ted Janusz

Mary Kay Ash, the founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, said that she believed that everybody she met had an invisible sign hanging around their necks that said, “Make me feel important.” And making them feel important was one of the key factors to her success.

If you think about it, her entire business model was based on making other people feel important. Her best salespeople drove around in pink Cadillacs. And by the way it wasn’t just a limited number of her top salespeople who drove those Cadillacs. No, if you achieved a certain goal, anybody on the team could been seen driving around town in a Cadillac. And how did you as a salesperson achieve that goal, by making your customers feel more attractive and important!

Rather spending your hard-earned money on marketing or advertising, wouldn’t it be great if you could get your customers to sell for you? Well, you can … simply by making them feel important. And feeling  important and as though they are making a difference in this world is the number one need of most people.

Here are three ways to accomplish that:

Form an Advisory Council

One of the ideas I like to share with my audiences is for each of them to form an Advisory Council. Here is how it works: Once a quarter, take your best customers out to dinner to a fancy restaurant or country club. It especially helps if these customers are what best-selling author Seth Godin calls “sneezers,” people who are most influential in your community.

After dinner, ask your Advisory Council some questions like, “I’d like to give you a sneak peek at some new products and services we are thinking about rolling out. What do you think?” or “This is our new business plan for next year. What advice would you give us?”

And you know, it really doesn’t matter what they say! The key thing is that you made these people, who seem to know everybody in the community, feel important.

Not only will they be happy to meet other like-minded, influential members of the community at the quarterly meeting, they are likely to become lifetime customers themselves. (After all, who among your competitors are treating them so royally?)  Best of all, they likely will be unable to contain their enthusiasm around others about how you make them feel special.

After their quarterly meeting with you, if they overhear someone shopping for products or services that you offer, they are likely to chime into the conversation, beginning with words like, “You know, if that is what you are considering, you really need to see my friends. They’ll take really good care of you!”

And we all understand the power of personal recommendation and that word of mouth is the most influential and effective form of marketing you can get.

And you too can get it, for the price of dinner and some drinks, simply by making your best customers feel important.

Farm a Fraternity

We tend to like, trust and buy from people who are like us; we tend to not like, trust or buy from people whom we perceive are unlike us. There are plenty of potential customers in the community who are just like you! How do you know? They share the same interests that you do, which is a great starting point for building a business relationship.

So, to what groups do you belong?

• Chamber of Commerce
• Other business and civic groups
• Alumni associations and PTAs
• Fitness centers
• Toastmasters
• Church groups
• Softball teams
• Kids’ baseball, basketball or soccer leagues

But be sure to do this right. We’ve all been to events and encounter people trying to build business relationships the wrong way. They walk around the room, moving from person to person, repeating the same proclamation, which is something like, “Hi! I’m Joe! If you ever need your computer fixed, call me!” while shoving a business card in your hand.

“Networking is not selling,” warns Patti DeNucci, author of The Intentional Networker: Attracting Powerful Relationships, Referrals & Results in Business. “Networking is about relationships. It’s about conversations. It’s about getting to know people as people.”

When I was presenting to a group of CPAs, one attendee told me that every partner in the firm was required to join one of these affinity groups, any group of their choice. The CPAs found that Instead of advertising to a community, once they got to know the members of the group, it was a far easier and more effective way to market. And, of course, once you satisfy a few members of the group, the word will easily be spread by these evangelists throughout the rest of the group like a wild fire.

An interesting side note: my insurance agent sponsors an “athlete of the month” at the local high school. He regularly runs an advertisement featuring a prominent male and female athlete in the community paper. Not only will those athletes clip out the ad (Who cuts out and saves the advertisements of insurance agents – with the agent’s name, agency logo and contact information?), they will also send copies of the ad to their family and friends. This marketing activity also allows my agent to get to know the school administrators, coaches and parents – who also need to buy insurance. He gets all of these benefits by once a month making two future insurance clients feel important.

Team Up for Fusion Marketing

A customer database is oftentimes the most valuable asset any small business possesses.

Another business may not want to give up or sell you a list of their valued customers, but you don’t need to buy their list. You can simply team up with a non-competing but complementary business to promote your products and services to those customers and share the marketing expenses.

Examples have included:

• An auto dealer and a car wash owner
• A veterinarian and a pet store owner
• A sports bar proprietor and a sporting goods owner
• A restaurant owner and the community theater – One of the best places for the restaurant to advertise or offer a coupon was in the program for the theater.
• A hair salon and a clothing boutique

For the last example, the hair salon had a display for the clothing boutique; the clothing boutique had a display for the hair salon. The only real cost was the time it took for the two owners to get together to devise the displays!

Further, the other business person can become an evangelist for your business, and you can do the same for them.

In fact, Jim Kelly, the former CEO of UPS said, “The old adage ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ is being replaced with ‘Join ‘em and you can’t be beat.’”