Creating Customer Evangelists: Profit from Turning Loyal Customers into a Volunteer Sales Force [Hardcover]

I'd venture a guess that many of you reading this review have delved into a lot of business books in your lifetime. I'm sure that the best of intentions were taken into each book, only to find out that ½ way through the majority of them, they had lost their relevance and hadn't delivered on their promise. I mean, really, how many books about marketing can possibly have any really interesting and immediately helpful ideas?

While CCE is not a fiction thriller, it will keep you as engaged as any good novel would, because at it's heart, it tells a lot of great short stories, and it tells them with insight and conviction. The book follows a "case study" approach and illustrates a world-class case example of a company doing CE right in each chapter. And, unlike those feel-good business books about how breakthrough something is that leave you hanging with no action items, CCE includes a full set of appendices on how you, yes you and your business, can get going on your CE efforts.

The book lays out the process of creating customer evangelists in the following order:
1. Customer Plus-Delta (you need to be continuously gathering customer feedback)
2. Napsterize Your Knowledge (share and share alike, and freely, and not cheap crap either - put some good material out there!)
3. Build the Buzz (find the WOM networks in your industry and tap into them, not blatantly, but intelligently. Oh, and give to get. See principle #2)
4. Create Community (encourage your customers to mingle, either physically or virtually - build a coalition of customers around your cause)
5. Make Bite-Size Chunks (devise specialized, smaller offerings to get your customers to bite) The software industry uses this tactic with abandon. When's the last time you bought software w/ out a trial download?
6. Create a Cause (focus on making your world, industry, community, and company a better place because you were involved)

These are easy enough principles to understand, but NOT_EASY_TO_EMBRACE. How many of you are prepared to "Napsterize" what you know to everyone in and around your industry? Really, how many? Do your marketing managers actually "participate" in the industry and community, or are you all a bunch of bystanders.

Creating customer evangelists is about more than "implementing a few best-practices", this is not six-sigma, but there are ways to measure, and Ben & Jackie have an entire appendix devoted to those to!

Are you ready to embrace your best customers as customer evangelists? Get the book - get the culture!

Just within the book's first five (of 16) chapters, McConnell and Huba answer questions such as these:

1. What are the attributes of customer evangelists?

2. What are the six tenets of customer evangelism?

3. Why are customer evangelists the ultimate salespeople"?

4. How to begin the process of creating customer evangelists?

5. What is "Customer Plus-Delta" and what are its "ten golden rules"?

6. What must any organization do to achieve its own Customer Plus-Delta?

7. What are the five key lessons to be learned from Napster?

8. What are the five myths and realities about buzz?

9. Why is a meme so important?

10. Which helpful hints will help any organization to create its own meme?

Chapters 9-15 focus on HOW seven companies create "customer evangelists" who (in effect) become "a volunteer sales force." McConnell and Huba devote a separate chapter to Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, SolutionPeople, O'Reilly & Associates, the Dallas Mavericks, Build-A-Bear Workshop, Southwest Airlines, and IBM. The last chapter all by itself is well worth far more than the cost of this book. In it, "The Customer Evangelism Workshop," McConnell and Huba review all of their key points and then suggest HOW literally any organization can (after appropriate modification, of course) use the six tenets of customer evangelism as a framework for its own initiatives. The three appendices which follow are worthy of note: Appendix A examines uses and abuses of e-mail communications, Appendix B offers "8 Tips on Creating an Ideavirus for Your Business," and Appendix C suggests how to measure customer evangelism.

I think this book will be of substantial benefit to decision-makers in literally all organizations (especially those with limited resources) who agree with McConnell and Huba that anyone within or associated with a given organization can -- and should -- help to "translate [its] value proposition into words the prospects can understand" as volunteers in its sales force.

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out the sources listed in a brief but adequate References section. To those excellent sources I now presume to add Theodore Levitt's The Marketing Imagination; Bernd Schmitt's Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, and Relate to Your Company and Brands; Michael Wolf's The Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces Are Transforming Our Lives; Jeffrey Shuman and Janice Twombly's Everyone Is a Customer: A Proven Method for Measuring the Value of Every Relationship in the Era of Collaborative Business; Stephen Denning's The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations; and David Maister's Practice What You Preach: What Managers Must Do to Create a High-Achievement Culture.

To decision-makers in larger organizations, I also highly recommend Curt Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina's Follow This Path: How the World's Greatest Organizations Drive Growth by Unleashing Human Potential as well as Carla O'Dell's If Only We Knew What We know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice.

This book is excellent - not only as a must read for businesses but for anyone who buys anything. Everyone is an evangelist for something, but this book really makes you realize the benefits of your evangelism - and it makes you want to be an evangelist for more products, services and people. From a business perspective, it shows you how other companies have provided an atmosphere for growing evangelists - do you know how you are growing customer evangelists in your organization? Read the book - and I guarantee you will get ideas on how to create these relationships with your customers.