INTRODUCTION
Seeing the Forest for the Trees
If you ever get the chance to travel to Vancouver Island in British Columbia, don’t miss Cathedral Grove. En route to our final destination, Tofino, a quaint town just on the edge of the Pacific Ocean and as far west as one can go in Canada, my wife, Heather, and I traveled down the bumpy, winding highway in our small rental car and eventually made it to the halfway point.
Cathedral Grove is one of those rare spots on the planet that maintains an almost caricature-like feeling. It’s as if you’ve entered a surreal scene in the latest Pixar film. Nestled within MacMillan Provincial Park, the trees here are old—really old—some almost 800 years old. People from all over the world come to walk these forest trails canopied by ancient, towering Douglas firs, some more than 250 feet high. My wife and I took the obligatory tourist photos of each other trying to wrap our arms around the massive trunks.
We then sat for a while and took in everything as the trees swayed in the wind. I couldn’t help but think this isn’t the place I’d want to be if a large windstorm came rolling through, but at that moment it was simply peaceful. After walking for a while, we came upon a break in the forest that led to a small stream. We sat down on the water’s edge to relax for a few minutes, and though I was on my honeymoon and business should have been the furthest thing from my mind, I couldn’t help it. Something about the evergreen trees intrigued me.
Then I realized: A great business is like an evergreen. Over time it, too, can grow to be a giant, towering above others. Its presence in the landscape is often awe-inspiring. It can be steadfast. Short of an act of God, scandal, or major industry disruption, such a business—like an evergreen—can weather most storms. Its customers are analogous to leaves (or perhaps more precisely, needles, since an evergreen is a conifer), and this kind of company is able to build incredible, long-lasting relationships with its customers. Consequently, evergreens remain lush, healthy, and green all year round. By contrast, other companies struggle to keep their customers, or routinely shed them as though they are dead leaves, and therefore are forced to continuously grow new leaves (or add new customers) in order to survive.
The analogy is a simple one, but I’ve found myself coming back to it again and again. One question in particular really resonates with me:
How is it that some companies seem able to effortlessly create
customer loyalty (thereby increasing their profits),
while others seem to be constantly dropping existing customers
and simultaneously struggling to find new ones?
Over the years I’ve spent a great deal of time working with companies across a variety of industries, and I’m positioned to answer that question. It has everything to do with the relationship between the company and the customer—how the company approaches that relationship, what systems it puts into place, and how it thinks about marketing. Most companies do not build those relationships beyond lip service—beyond the typical (and tired) assertion, “We provide wow service!”
Great companies do more. They spend the time to continually cultivate and nurture relationships with their customers, from even before they were actually customers! When a company invests in this manner, its customer relationships develop and become as strong as they can be, with customer loyalty becoming a key factor of the relationship. Like the roots of an 800-year-old tree, this loyalty eventually becomes capable of supporting tremendous and continuous growth. This is the kind of company that becomes Evergreen.
WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK
When it comes to working with clients, I’m a pragmatist. I want my clients to experience dramatic results, and quickly. My work can be boiled down to helping them answer two simple questions: How do you most effectively get a new customer? And more important: Once you have that customer, how do you keep that customer for life?
My clients have come from all over the world and have worked in hundreds of different industries. However, throughout the past decade, I have largely focused on online entities. I became known in Internet circles as the Customer Retention Guy. I am the person companies call when they want to figure out why they are losing customers, and how to stop the bleeding.
It became apparent that many problems were similar from one company to the next. I soon identified three distinct areas where problems could be located and solutions implemented. I named them the Three Cs of an Evergreen organization. Once I saw these patterns clearly, I could easily solve dozens of problems related to everything from sales and marketing to customer service to employee retention and more. In short, I could help a business go from losing customers and money one day to keeping customers and making money the next. Companies started bringing me in to do consultations, strategy sessions, workshops, and assessments. I worked with marketing departments, sales teams, customer service divisions, senior executives, and CEOs. It was satisfying, to say the least, to recognize that so many complex business challenges could stem from one of these three distinct areas.
But this book isn’t about me. This book is about you and your business. I’m here to help you now! I make some bold suggestions in the first half of the book. For example, I debunk the myth that companies should spend so much energy (and money) focusing on new customer acquisition, arguing that this is actually the root cause of at least half of their problems. I also introduce and explain the Three Cs of an Evergreen organization—character, community, and content. These are the core principles that I believe generate true customer loyalty—and not just a pie-in-the-sky feeling of loyalty.
In the second half of the book, I make more bold suggestions. For instance, I believe the traditional Four Ps of marketing are dead, and there’s actually a far more simplistic way to think about marketing. To change your results you need to reevaluate the paradigm that was true yesterday and exchange it for the paradigm that is true today. Our world has changed. In these chapters I focus on the tactical and customer-retention–enhancing approaches that are available to all businesses. There are discussions about social media strategies, customer loyalty programs (and the types of rewards your customers really crave), customer lifetime value (CLV), and the ways that new customers interact with and communicate with your business. I also show you how to deal with customer complaints, when to fire a customer, and how to have new customers fall in love with you.
Note: Throughout the book I most often use the term customer, but you can use it interchangeably with client. I’m not here to argue the subtle distinctions between these two terms. Call them whatever you prefer, provided it forces you to treat every one of them with deep and profound respect.
The core message of this book is that keeping customers is not a mysterious process. It’s not magical. Loyalty isn’t some mythical essence that some companies are lucky to have. It’s built and created. Plus, it’s downright simple to create when you have the right understanding of how all the pieces fit together. Evergreen: Cultivate the Enduring Customer Loyalty That Keeps Your Business Thriving presents timeless principles for keeping customers happy, using frequent examples drawn from both high-profile companies and my own client files to demonstrate these principles in action—and it provides the tools you need to make it easy for you to apply each of these principles.
I’ll make you this promise: On the pages that follow, I’ll show you what’s worked with hundreds of my clients—how we’ve been able to shift from a pure how-do-we-get-more-new-customers outlook to a how-do-we-better-care-for-our-existing-customers mindset. Each time I’ve helped my clients make this shift, the results have been impressive. Everything has changed—from referrals, to word-of-mouth, to profit maximization, to marketing effectiveness. Character, community, and content are the roots of any successful company with truly loyal customers. Furthermore, the biggest benefits come to those who are able to apply these concepts long before they win the customer. What I’m presenting here is a system that can be used not only to dramatically grow your business—but also to ensure that your company will survive over the next ten years.
WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
From service professionals on the front lines to sales professionals, sole proprietors, small and medium-size business owners, senior-level executives, and even Fortune 500 CEOs, anyone whose business sells products, service, or information, and thus has a customer, will learn and benefit from the material in this book. Furthermore, I challenge anyone who has been addicted to a we-need-more-new-customers-now philosophy primarily because it seemed the only way to grow a company. (It isn’t. There’s a better way. Read on.) I conceived and created this book for you.
Throughout Evergreen, I use a variety of stories and examples that touch on a number of different industries. Please remember: Be open to new ideas. The marketplace has changed with advances in technology. It is only logical that your approach to marketing should follow suit with this new paradigm. Don’t dismiss ideas if you find your business and your customers are different from those discussed. Everyone’s customers are different. And yet the concepts that I’ve used to help small and medium-size businesses are the same as those being used by companies such as Amazon and Apple (and they might not even realize it).
WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK
Today’s customers demand something unlike anything they have ever wanted in the past—a connection with your business. This means that in order to increase customer loyalty, you need to create a relationship with that customer on a deeper and much more profound level.
I believe that becoming Evergreen requires an entirely new way of thinking about the market, our customers, and our marketing efforts. When we are able to change our thinking and how we represent ourselves (both in the marketplace as well as with our existing customers), we create a better, richer, and more fulfilling experience for the customer. When we, as business owners, take a vested interest in making these changes to our day-to-day operations and, more important, change how we approach relationships between our companies and our customers, we can’t help but build authentic customer loyalty.
By following the advice in this book, you will plant a seed that will take root and grow your business like the towering evergreens of Cathedral Grove. You’ll be required to think differently, even counterintuitively, about everything you’ve done in the past with regard to marketing your business, communicating with new and existing customers, approaching social media and using the Web, managing your reputation off-line and online, and dealing with negative feedback and irate customers. I’ll show you why the customer is not always right, and why not every customer is worth keeping. I’ll explain why some customers are worth fighting to bring back, and why sometimes your disloyal customers might offer you the greatest opportunity to increase profits. The content that I’m going to share in this book requires you to be bold, be willing to take a step into the unknown, and be able to accept a level of uncertainty.
Here’s what I can tell you with a fair amount of certainty: By implementing what you learn in Evergreen, you’ll acquire customers faster. You’ll also create legitimate brand loyalty—the type of loyalty that leads to customers ranting and raving about your business, that generates massive referrals and strong word-of-mouth, and that isn’t swayed by cheaper prices, more features, or (often ineffective) rewards cards. You’ll hold on to customers even if your products and services cost more. You’ll also reduce your marketing and advertising spending and increase spending on the customers who already do business with you, and they’ll return that spending twenty times over. You’ll develop a richer, more complex customer experience that resonates with your customer. Finally, you’ll no longer wander the social media landscape, wondering if anyone is listening; you’ll know exactly where to be, where to go, and what to say.
I could keep going, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that what I’ve already stated might be enough to keep you interested. This is a book for visionaries—those willing to look at the act of “conducting” business in a different light. Those willing to accept it’s not just “business as usual” anymore.