How Raving Fans Build Walls of Belief

Isn't this wall amazing? It's called Sacsayhuaman. It was built by ancient Inca tribesmen in Peru. I believe this wall is a wonderful metaphor for how people build "Walls of Belief" in themselves, their products, and their organizations.

At the very bottom, where a single stone may weigh as much as 300 tons, you have the product or service and the people who created it. More stones are built upon that foundation for production and delivery and quality assurance. Sales and marketing come next, as we find customers to help us build our brand. Sometimes, those big stones at the bottom may well represent key accounts that are the financial foundation of the company. Shake one of those anchors loose and the whole wall can come crashing down.

If we are excellent at what we do, as we build our customer base, we develop Raving Fans. These are not ordinary everyday customers. These are the people who are zealots for our cause. They believe in us and our services so much that they become our champions.

Ken Blanchard, the "One Minute Manager" guru, wrote a book in 1993 called, "Raving Fans." The concept of the book was simple: in today's world, you cannot just have satisfied customers. You need ecstatic customers - Raving Fans - who receive such wonderful customer service from you and who love your product so much that they will drive the success of your business.

Since this book was published people everywhere have been in search of Raving Fans. How can we create them? How can we "clone" them to grow more such wonderful clients? How can we keep them? Blanchard really seemed to have struck a nerve. In an era of shaky ethics and crumbling brands, business had to start making themselves more accountable to create new legions of "evangelists."

In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell sought to teach us how to "light a match" under the power of our Raving Fans to create an "epidemic" of business. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell actually applied what he learned in studying huge health epidemics to business. He also pointed out the huge power of getting the right people to help you grow a movement. "Centers of Influence" would be what most sales training courses would call these folks.

So the goal of business had to be - not only to create Raving Fans - but to create the right Raving Fans - people who were in key strategic positions to promote your cause (or your product) to the rest of society (or your market).

Finally, in 2003, Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell, published "Creating Customer Evangelists." This book explored the successful development of several companies (Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, The Dallas Mavericks, and Southwest Airlines, just to name a few) through the "lens" of their Customer Evangelists. That is, these companies did not just have satisfied customers, they did not just have Raving Fans, these companies had Raving Fans who actively promoted the company.

Think of it. Your best customers out there selling for you! The perfect situation - just find the right customers, offer them a great product, treat them exceptionally well, and then let them market for you.

When I read these concepts, I was fired up! This made so much sense. But there was one thing missing! No one was offering a way to give a face and voice to these Raving Fans. No one was giving the Customer Evangelists an easy way to tell their story to others.

For the past 12 years, I had been traveling around the country as the Nation's TechnoMotivator™. My goal was to help people learn how to more effectively use technology in their everyday lives. It was during this time that I discovered how multimedia technology was soon going to change how we communicate on this planet.

Prior to working as a speaker, I had worked on-camera for 10 years and spent about 6,000 hours in front of cameras as a spokesman for a myriad of products and services.

In most of these multimedia projects, we did interviews of some sort with customers. Frankly they were universally awful. Before the cameras would roll, you would be talking to this wonderful passionate individual. Then they would say, "Roll 'em," and that wonderful person you were talking to would disappear. In his place was some wooden, boring person that sounded "canned."

Besides that, the videos we would produce cost way too much, took way to long to produce, and because of those factors, you had to "shoot for the middle." That is, you could not create marketing pieces that we finely targeted to one segment. You needed this baby to reach everyone since it was costing you an arm and a leg and it was taking so darn long to get it out.

Then there was distribution. Sending tapes was always difficult. Later we tried CDs and DVDs, but that was also a problem.

But with the coming of the Millennium we suddenly had digital video camcorders that rivaled the quality of studio shoots. Desktop video and sound editing put $100,000 edit suites on your office desk. And THEN came Broadband Internet Connections! Now you could capture the interview, edit it, and deliver it via the web to anyone anywhere!

I started working on this new multimedia Raving Fan interview concept, and for the past 2 years, I have refined it and crunched most of the high costs out of the process. Most of the interviews I do now are captured right over the phone, recorded and edited on my desktop computer, then streamed off of the web. Sometimes people are so effective on camera that I recommend that we shoot video, but for the most part, the telephone interviews with added graphics work quite well and cost effectively. So cost effectively that you no longer have to "shoot for the middle" with endorsements. You can afford to have have tons of interviews!

But don't take my word for this. Click on some of my Client's Raving Fan interviews. Click on my own clients talking about the process at this link - Metcalf's Raving Fans. Or click on this page, Telling the Client's Story, where you can hear clients telling their own stories with my help.