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April 06, 2009
On being a chief evangelist
Betsy Weber has been chief evangelist of software company TechSmith for six years. Her role is to listen to customers, determine their needs, sift that data and put it into context for TechSmith's software developers.
At the same time, she's also building a passionate fan base for TechSmith by meeting customers and being the warm, caring person she is naturally.
We asked her to put her six years of work into numbers:
- Met 7,000 customers in person
- Attended nearly 200 conferences (30 per year)
- Picked up 3,000 followers on Twitter
- Maintains regular, personalized contact with about 1,000 people
Has it paid off? TechSmith has done well in that time: double-digit revenue growth every year, totaling 259%. It's one thing for your company to say, in blog posts and email newsletters, that it loves customers. It's another thing to go out and do the hard work of brand grassroots-building and demonstrate it face-to-face.
(If you're interested, Betsy will explain how to be a company chief evangelist officer in a SWOM webinar this Wednesday.)
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I just love the word evangelist, which in the Greek means "Good News." It's clear that Betsy does an excellent job of being the bearer of Good News. I too function in this capacity for my company and relish the opportunity to interact directly with prospects, customers and community members.
One of the other things that was telling in your post was the importance of “meeting” customers face-to-face. At the end of the day it all comes down to relationships no matter how much social media you want to throw at your marketing activities, or whatever you choose to call them.
Interesting…
In the world of my specialty retail clients, we call it relationship retailing. Building tightly knit relationships with customers, one customer at a time, is a capability that energetic, entrepreneurial retailers possess that their much larger, big box competitors can never hope to duplicate.
Building client relationships was definitely the most enjoyable part of my retail career. That everyday face to face interaction is something I miss.
I find interesting that of all of those contacts, only 10 percent of those are maintained contacts. How much is really being gotten out of those twitter followers? The personal contacts still seem to merit a lot more.
