Create Raving Fans That Sell For You

Who sells products in your showroom? Duh, it’s the salespeople – right? Not always. In today’s 24-7-365-connected world where 99% of the population does not buy socks without searching Google first, your best salespeople may be your happy clients and customers. Increasingly, all businesses are capitalizing on customers whose expectations were exceeded to be spokespeople. There are a myriad of options available to capture this critical market and make your raving fans an important component of your marketing effort.

To develop a community of customer advocates you first have to create happy customers. It starts with blocking and tackling. You need to deliver on promises and fix problems immediately. Customer service is awful most of the time in almost every type of business, so when you get the basics right, you often look like a hero. However, if you don’t deliver, it will be next to impossible to build a fan base.

Understand what causes or can cause your customers pain. The ability to recognize, prevent, and mitigate customer problems makes you and your team invaluable. During your conversations with customers about their project, identify how you can eliminate customer pain. This may involve pointing out a particular installation nuance, providing a realistic timetable for product delivery, project coordination and staging that needs to be considered, and a host of other issues that you know occur on every project, but your customers don’t have a clue about. That is why it is critically important to obtain as much information about a project as possible, so you are in a best position to prevent their problems from occurring and making you and your team look like superstars.

Put your customers and their projects on pedestals by asking if you could develop a case history of their project or use their project in your marketing media, e.g. web site, project book, eblasts, PR efforts, social media sites and so on. Asking to profile a customer’s project sends the message that you believe the project is media-worthy and special. What do you think a customer would say to a coworker or neighbor after you put their project in your showroom’s hall of fame? The reference is likely to be glowing.

Ask for video testimonials from your customers that you can place on your web site, incorporate into electronic media, and feature on the showroom floor. Ask your customers to tell their story of their project and how you assisted in making their dreams a reality. If a video is not possible, what about posting on Pinterest, Yelp, Google or Houzz?

Try to align your message with your customer’s. Look for opportunities to leverage your message with the message offered by your trade accounts to build synergy and determine if there are opportunities to market together.