How Do You Find And Focus On Your Promoters?

If you are not creating promoters of your product or service, you are inhibiting your own growth. Growth is expensive and if you don't have positive word of mouth it becomes more expensive. How do you find and focus on your promoters?

Notes from a conversation with Richard Owen, CEO, Satmetrix Systems

It is important to attend to two audiences - your detractors and your promoters. You must identify your detractors and respond with service recovery to get them back on your side. Negative word of mouth can destroy you in the social networks. At the same time, you must identify your promoters and find ways to get them to actively let others know about your business.

To accomplish these dual priorities, companies need to be able to look at all of the data that they are getting from customers. What do these data tell you about your business at the macro level so that you make good strategic choices and investments? If the data says that customers are dissatisfied with your service for specific reasons this provides you with actionable information.

Leaders and managers are looking for ways to make employees more accountable. For example, let's take a company with ten sales people. You want to be continually measuring customer feedback using a standard ranking so that you can see which reps are doing the best. Just looking at sales revenue productivity doesn't tell the whole story. Good metric feedback has two positive effects. First, it helps you to understand the individual rep's strengths and weaknesses and allows you to create individualized action and coaching plans. Second, there is a tendency for those at the bottom to improve just because they know that they are being measured.

These are simple ideas, but making this work in practice is a challenge. Generally, small to medium-sized business are better at this than larger customers, primarily because they tend to be closer to their customers. Setting up an effective system takes more leadership than anyone realizes and is actually counter to the realities of most companies. Success requires a long-term perspective and an external versus internal focus.

The other side of the coin is that while the leadership of many mid-market companies is as sophisticated as that in large companies, mid-market companies lack the resources of large companies. It is important that any system allows the mid-market company to generate actionable metrics cost-effectively. Focus on promoters allows a company to get 90% of the value for 10% of the effort while managing resources.