Customer Success Series: Turn Customers Into Evangelist | Donald C. Kelly - 2010

In the final part of this customer success and retention series, I share how businesses can move beyond simple transactions and turn satisfied customers into true brand evangelists. The focus is on creating experiences that people remember and naturally want to talk about. The Power of Memorable Experiences Brand evangelists are not created by accident. They are built through intentional experiences that feel thoughtful and immersive. Some of the best examples of this come from companies like Disney, where every detail is designed to fully immerse guests in the experience. Chick-fil-A, where every interaction is grounded in gratitude and positivity. And the Ritz Carlton, where employees are empowered to solve problems quickly and go above and beyond for guests. Small Gestures, Big Impact You do not need massive systems to create loyal customers. Often, it is the small things that make the biggest difference. Simple actions like handwritten notes, birthday messages, or personalized videos can go a long way. Taking time to actively listen and truly acknowledge customers also helps them feel seen and valued. Even recognizing milestones like one-year anniversaries or highlighting loyal customers can strengthen the relationship. The Four Levels of Buying Customers typically move through four stages in their relationship with a brand. It starts with a buyer, then a repeat buyer, followed by a loyal customer. The highest level is an evangelist, someone who not only stays with your brand but actively refers others and speaks positively about your business in places like podcasts, social media, and conversations. “Usually it's not taking a huge fix to be able to switch and get people to become evangelists. It's just the little things. And I can tell you those little things are what make a difference.” - Donald C. Kelly. Resources Keep track of your sales activity and boost your results with the Prospect Pro sales tool https://prospectpro.io/. Step up your sales game with Sales Mastermind https://thesalesevangelist.com/sales-mastermind/. Get accountability, stay motivated, and tackle the blockers keeping you from hitting your goals. Visit Blue Mango Studios https://bluemangostudios.com/ for help in creating podcast production content. Sponsorship Offers This episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot. With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales https://www.hubspot.com/products/sales. This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn. Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator at linkedin.com/tse https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/cx/20/09/sales-navigator-podcast?src=re-pod&trk=tse&veh=tse&mcid=6897323946090332160. This episode is brought to you in part by the TSE Sales Foundation. Improve your connection on LinkedIn and land three or five appointments with our LinkedIn prospecting course. Go to the salesevangelist.com/linkedin https://tsesales.typeform.com/to/UCMfjZbX. Credits As one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey http://thesalesevangelist.com/survey. https://tsesales.typeform.com/to/lc5yAa8P We’d love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sales-evangelist/id788738885, Google Podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3RoZXNhbGVzZXZhbmdlbGlzdC5saWJzeW4uY29tL3Jzcw?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj5kaXI3Pj2AhVKcjABHW5PDVwQ9sEGegQIARAC, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-sales-evangelist-sales-trainingspeakingbusiness-marketingdonald, or Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/1NjzsFjQwVrgboUfDvbzd5?si=LdQOJDc1T-WBPMxr1h3RsA. Audio provided by Free SFX, https://freesfx.co.uk/ Soundstripe https://soundstripe.com/, and Bensound http://www.bensound.com/. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and produced by Brightseed and Hill.

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  How do you create evangelists for your organization? Can you do something to actually get people to want to brag about you and tell their friends willingly without you probing them or paying them? Well, it's definitely possible, and I can tell you how we have done it. You're gonna love it. Check it out.

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  Hey, hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to another great episode of the Sales Evangelist Podcast. I'm your host, Donald C. Kelly, the Sales Evangelist, and I'm so excited for another great episode. I'm so excited to be here with you today. On this episode, we're going to be going over the third episode of the series, and this is our Customer Success Customer Retention Series. And we talked about the mindset and how to help with the leaky bucket problem. We talked about customer lifetime value in that first one, then we went into five pillars of customer success. And then today, we're going into how we can make people become evangelists. If this is your first time listening to the series, go back and listen to the other two. If you've been listening to the series, I would love for you to connect with me on LinkedIn and just tell me Customer Success Series. I will know what you're talking about. Again, go on LinkedIn, connect with me and say Customer Success Series.

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  I would greatly appreciate that, and we'd love to chat. But let's go and dive into this thing right now. So the last leg of the race now is like, how can we create these memorable experiences that get people to be so excited that they're going to be evangelizing for our brand? And you know, several brands out there that falls into this category, right? People just love to talk about them. People find them memorable. It's not transactional. I want to give you some like Disney, the whole experience. I mean, that's expensive over there. But the whole experience at a Disney theme park is around, they're taking you, immersing you into a world and this experience. And that whole thing, everything is engineered, every detail, where the trash cans are and so forth. It's just, it's designed to be able to help you to be more,

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  to have a world-class experience. And that piece is the next level, right? The Chick-fil-A experience, you know, my pleasure. Every time you go to Chick-fil-A, it's they're not just like rushing you along. They're smiling and being happy and crazy grateful to have you there. Then the Ritz-Carlton experience, and I love this one a lot because the Ritz-Carlton experience is really neat where you meet with, if you go to Ritz-Carlton, doesn't matter if you ask the janitor for your room or some detail, they're going to help you. They'll get off of the ladder and come and help you as opposed to saying, I don't know, go to the front desk. Like, that's not a cool experience. Local businesses. That you are probably aware of, like that just goes above and beyond and take care of you. If you can make people feel good, go back to the problem that we saw at the very beginning, why people leave?

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  If you don't feel comfortable, they don't feel grateful that you're feel that you're grateful for them, they're gonna leave. They have to feel that way. So how can we do that? And this is a constant question you may be asking. Are my emails doing this way when I'm first reaching out to someone? The way that I talk? Am I smiling? Am I frustrated when they have an issue and angry? Do they feel that in my voice or the text that I'm sending over to when I'm writing over to them? Or did it feel like, yeah, they're grateful to help me solve a problem and feel so, you know, they're bummed that I'm coming across a challenge?

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  So what is one of the your biggest customer complaint? What is the thing that they don't like? Is it the fact that you're not on time? You deliver things late or you don't deliver things at all? Like those things can be easily fixed and you can adjust that. Usually it's not taking a huge fix to be able to switch and get people to become evangelists. It's just the little things. And I can tell you those little things are what make a difference. And the reason why? Because no one is doing them or the majority of people are not. Doing them. So the bar is extremely low. You can change it and you can think about an example. You can do a team. You can just think about what's a wow factor. If we were to do this one thing, what would change for all of our customer? Like for me, maybe that was if I did get all your information and if you did, when you subscribe to the podcast and I'm able to send you a voice note, say, hey,

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  thanks so much for listening to the podcast. I appreciate it. That would be a huge wow factor. I do this on LinkedIn. So if you want to check it out, go ahead and connect with me, not necessarily follow, because I don't know sometimes if you're following, but to connect with me, send me a connection request and you'll see how oftentimes like we can start engagement. But send me a message on LinkedIn and say a customer success series and I will know. But what's one wow factor? We talked about some of these already handwritten note, birthday surprises, surprise upgrades or the video, personal video messages. Perhaps you get something to the client every one year anniversary that been with you, sending them a message saying, you know, thank you for partnering with us, trusting us to be able to help your sales team or thanks for trusting us to be able to be your HR provider and for helping with your books or whatever it is.

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  But you sending that personal message to them like that just makes a huge difference and people will want to tell you. But the five, the four levels for these buyers, right? The first one is a buyer. The second one is now they're a repeat buyer. The third one, they're a loyal customer. They love the brand. And the third one, they become evangelist. They're going on podcasts. They're going to talk to you about you. They're influencers and influencing others to check out your brand. They're doing these things because they just love what you offer. That is the differentiator when it comes to this. And they also want to become an evangelist. Once you'd start doing these small things for them and you incite them, they will start referring other people to you. They'll start defending your brand. And this is where you know, when you have an evangelist, I've seen it before where people like,

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  I remember once on LinkedIn, somebody was like dogging me because of my lack of experience comparable to him, saying I wasn't good enough, blah, blah, blah. Somebody who listened to the podcast jumped out and started defending me and I was like, that guy, I appreciate him, but now I know that guy was an evangelist. Like what is he saying when I'm not around? If he's defending my brand like that, like that was huge, but your people will start doing that for you. Harley Davidson, they see this very well, right? People who are Harley fan, I mean, they're getting tattoos on their body with Harley because they just feel a kinship, they feel a community. And I think that's one of the things when you get evangelists, if you can get a community of people together and show them love and express, you know, your, your care for them, like that just makes them want to support you even more.

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  And I just can't keep explaining that, you know, finding customers and doing case study on them. That's another huge, big one.

• 9:14Speaker 00

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  The most dynamic buyer network working just for you. Accelerate your sales with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Try LinkedIn Sales Navigator now with a free 60-day trial at LinkedIn.com/sell. That's LinkedIn.com/sell. Terms and conditions apply. Since 2013, we launched this podcast. The goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information, and I feel that we've successfully done so. As a natural byproduct, listeners like you would reach out and ask, could I coach them? Could I train their team? Could I come and speak in an S K O? Could I consult for them? And that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to this day.

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  So in 2019, one of our clients saw what we did and asked, could we do that for them? We experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency. Now we create podcasts for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing. I would love to show you and your team how we can create podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source, but also educational and a lead generation. If you're interested, go to bluemangostudios.com. Again, bluemangostudios.com and our team can show you exactly what we did. It's amazing.

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  So I want you to think, who are your top five evangelists? Who are the people that just you know, they will always talk about your brand? They're going to tell friends, they're going to tell everyone to know. Who are those top five people? Write that down. And then I want you to think about what can I do to make their experience more wow? Whether you're the salesperson or the sales leader, what else can I offer to them? You know, why do they love you? You know, think about those top five, why do they love you? And how could you deepen that relationship? Is there something else that you could do to make them feel even better? Could you put their picture on your website or something? Could you refer clients to them, other people? And like, I don't know what it is, but you can do simple things that's going to help them to feel that you care for them and they become endeared to you.

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  Now, some of these things don't take too long and too much to do. As a sales professional, you can do some of them. As a sales leader, you can do these and get the organization to do it. But those are some of the things that will help these people to become evangelists for your brand. It is not complicated. And that's what we've seen at the Sales Evangelist again, over the years. Doing small things, letting people know you care and letting them know you, helping them to feel that you care. When they talk, you listen. And it's not like just saying, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. It's listening and listening with understanding, focusing on the eyes, looking in the eyes. One lady told me this week, she said, you do a great job of looking in people's eyes. And that just helps them to feel that you care and you're not necessarily just winging it or just doing it because you have to.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  I am tremendously grateful to have you here in our audience. I am tremendously grateful that you're finding value in the podcast. And I would encourage you to keep spreading the love and the benefit of the show to others. If you enjoyed this episode and you're enjoying the series, go ahead and drop me a message on LinkedIn. And you can find details about me in the show notes. Now, the series was the Customer Success, Customer Retention Series. First, we spoke about a customer mindset and the leaky bucket concept. We then went into teaching about the five pillars of customer success. And then today, we talked about creating evangelists. It is not difficult to get them evangelists. Show people you love them and you'll see magic happens. As always, I want you to thrive, I want you to succeed. But most importantly, I want you to raise your level of thinking.

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  I want you to go out, I want you to retain your customers, and I want you to do big things. See you on the next one.

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  The Sales Evangelist Podcast is created by the Sales Evangelist Sales Training Organization. It is produced by TSE Studios. Our podcast production manager is Nancy Paul. Our audio engineer is Jershun Obayal. Our video engineer is DeSahn Kunado. Guest management is done by Jill Vito and Kristy Virtus. Our content writer is Carlisa Galberith. Our graphic designer is Yurvish Savalia. And I'm your host and executive producer, Donald C. Kelly. Sales Podcast Network.