Evangelists, Apostles and Profits

By David Skinner, President Holiday Equity

A couple years back, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba proclaimed that customers could be the best sales force a company could ever have, a dedicated and for-free sales force.  They wrote a best selling book about it, Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force. They pointed to companies like Southwest Airlines, Krispy Kreme, Build-A-Bear Workshops, and IBM as companies enjoying just such customer loyalty. So loyal, in fact, customers go out of their way to spread the word. Not just to refer their friends, but to proselytize them. They are the Evangelists.   

This is not just one more “show and tell” business book. The authors give clear steps how a company can forge such a relationship with its customers. And unlike faddish business theories that are hard to apply to timeshare, this one makes solid suggestions about how to become just such a company. Here are a few:

• Focus on solving customer needs.
• Put the customer's success at the heart of your business relationships.
• Make customers feel special; create “clubs” and “communities” in which your customers can participate.
• Create “causes” that customers can be emotionally attached to, deliver unequalled service, and show genuine interest in what customers do and how you can help them do it better.
• Be loyal to customers, and they will be loyal to you. (Remember, customers are loyal to people, NOT products.)
• Create genuine buzz about your company (the authors describe how to do that).
• Share knowledge openly with prospects and customers, instead of hoarding it.

If you’re the Developer or Marketing Director, those sound like terrific ideas. But you’re probably also thinking, “Those ideas will never get past the planning stage. They’ll never be made into slogans or inspiring posters. And most importantly, they’ll never impact the customer.” Skinner’s Law would tell you: The further a customer service project is from the immediate bottom line, the less likely it will ever get management’s support to succeed. Yes, it may be important, but it’s not urgent—and timeshare is an urgency business.

But wait. McConnell and Huba make a final point. Creating customer evangelists is a bottom-up process, not a top-down one. Becoming a company that customers rave about begins with the staff they meet every day, in the hall, the dining areas, on the grounds, in phone rooms. They’re not likely to meet the Developer, and it’s probably better they don’t. Clearly, to build a company that inspires evangelists you need an army of apostles. And your people are your Apostles. 

Timeshare is a service industry and apart from the elevators, little else mechanical can go wrong. Our employees, therefore, represent the brand and communicate the message. Ironically, they are the ones we often pay the least, the ones who don the uniforms and the name tags, and are told to use the service entrance. How do we get them to feel the same commitment to their job and the company as you do? Their life goals are perhaps not as lofty, their daily problems likely more pressing; yet we rely on them to create customer evangelists. We rely on them to be our apostles. With so much riding on so few, what is the solution—a real and lasting solution?

With one eye on the bottom line and the other on the bottom echelons, our company undertook the task of building apostles to in turn create evangelists. Knowing that another makeshift, do-it-yourself approach would, like times before, only lead to failure, we called on the help of Terry Schmidt, a Harvard Business School-educated management consultant. His approach was different and it surprised us. He neither started at the top nor at the bottom, but holistically and from the beginning. Here’s an abbreviated list of what he coached us through:

He called upon us to form departmental and cross-departmental task forces to sharpen our vision and mission. “If your vision is not sharp, then your future is likely dim,” Terry said. “And if you want your apostles to march in step, they need to share in discovering the mission. People tend to support what they help create.”

Each team’s task was to define a set of core values that best describe the company we wanted to be. A company’s brand emerges from the inside out based upon its core values and competencies. Terry assigned line staff and managers to work shoulder to shoulder on these heart-to-heart questions. A feeling of camaraderie, “can-do,” personal respect, and new friendships grew out of these ad hoc groups, with each asking, “Who do we want to be?” 

These representatives then went back to their own departments and shared their new vision and enthusiasm. Focusing on their own departments’ function, they described their responsibility and commitment within the overall company mission. As Terry said, “When employees understand at a deep emotional level how their personal hopes and dreams can be fulfilled by delighting the customer, they willingly go the extra mile that all apostles travel. In other words, if what’s in it for them is gained through what’s in it for the customer, then we all succeed.”

While it is too early to say whether this new enthusiasm will carry over to creating long-term company evangelists as authors McConnell and Huba wrote about, the newfound enthusiasm for the company and jobs alike was very quickly felt. Without a doubt, we have gained new apostles who will lead us to greater profits.  

Terry Schmidt specializes in helping companies become more strategic, productive, and profitable. He is the founder of www.ManagementPro.com and can be reached at terry@managementpro.com.

David Skinner is President of Holiday Equity (http://www.meetholiday.com), a division of the Holiday Group, which he founded in 1992. David has three adult children, is married and resides in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, from where he commutes to Seattle, Holiday’s home base. He can be emailed at dskinner@holidaygroup.com.

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