Church of the Customer Blog
« Spring-loaded evangelism | Main | Won't get fooled again »
June 21, 2004
Spring-loaded evangelism
It's not often you get to meet the people who are changing the world with a shoe, but I did last week.
Among a group of 300, person after person told me how this funny-looking shoe had changed their life. Many had been immobilized with crippling leg, foot or back injuries and pains until this shoe "gave me back my life."
The people I met were gathered in Albuquerque, N.M. for the first-annual independent dealer conference for shoemaker Z-Coil. Most had been customers first. (Many said that being a Z-Coil dealer was their first entry into entrepreneurialism, too.)
During my presentation, I asked dealers to raise their hands if a customer had ever tearfully thanked them for "changing or saving their life." Nearly all of them raised their hands. That's remarkable.
Customer evangelism begins with being remarkable -- giving customers something to talk about. If you change someone's life, you almost instantaneously create a true believer. Create enough true believers, and you'll create a movement to change the world.
Other blogs that reference Spring-loaded evangelism:
» Return of the Business of Business Blogging from Peabody's Cre8tive Flow Blog
The first time I wrote about business blogs a couple of weeks back, I was excited by the concept and on a voyage of discovery of blogs. After some [Read More]
That's a fantastic case-study to use. If you have any addtional info on this, I would love to see it. We try to get our clients to understand this principal everyday, and the (obvious) best way is to show them what being 'real' has done for other companies.
Z-Coil maintains a comprehensive list of articles that have featured its shoes and/or profiled the company. You can see all the links here: http://www.zcoil.com/news.cfm
Thanks. They'll be put to good use.
Just a note to confirm the wonderful talk Ben McConnell delivered at the Z-Coil conference, he was fantastic.
I have "Evangelists" but I realized I was not acknowledging them appropriately so I am in the process of changes. Everyone enjoys a special thanks even if they just love my shoe.
How's this one, a customer got approval from his head office for all employes (about 44,000) of them to wear my shoes. He had to send his shoes away and could not even wear them for three months.
Thanks, Donna. You and your colleagues are a special group of people. Let me know how things go after spending more time building relationships with your existing evangelists!
