Learn About Our Workshops

Customer loyalty is a misunderstood and abused marketing idea that has by now lost nearly all connection to business reality. We all know that having loyal customers must be beneficial to a business. And as customers ourselves, we know what it means to be loyal to our favorite products, services, and brands. But few companies are genuinely good at maintaining and improving customer loyalty, tracking it, or measuring its actual benefits. This workshop is designed to help consumer-facing businesses improve the loyalty of the customers they sell to.

B2B customers have never relied on advertising as much as B2C customers have. Until recently, to learn about the products and services they need for their companies, B2B customers relied on vendor-provided information, along with word-of-mouth insights from friends and colleagues. And the traditional sales and promotional tools for vendors included trade shows, testimonials, referrals, customer case studies, and the credibility that comes from serving reference customers. But new online technologies, including social media, have dramatically shifted the selling model. Research shows that online sources and the opinions of peers and colleagues are now the primary tools of a B2B prospect’s search for information about a vendor’s products, even as early as the discovery stage in the buying process. To meet this challenge, a completely new discipline has grown up among B2B vendors, involving the cultivation of advocates within existing customers to serve as beacons for attracting and persuading prospects. Learning about the customer advocacy discipline and how to apply it is the subject of this half-day workshop.

Consumers no longer rely principally on advertising to learn about products and services they might want. Instead, they seek out information online – not just from a brand itself, but from third-party review sites, subject matter experts they find online, and their own social media connections. Nearly 90% of Americans report they do online research before buying virtually anything new, while 75% check product reviews first, and 80% use a smartphone to help with shopping. If at least some of your current customers have a genuine emotional affection for your brand, and are willing to advocate on your behalf to other consumers, you will have a tremendous leg up in the new environment, an environment in which everyone is connected to everyone, 24/7. This workshop is designed to show you how to make it happen.

A lot of traditional, widely acceptable and perfectly legal business practices just can’t be trusted by customers and will soon become extinct by rising levels of transparency and increasing consumer demand for fair treatment, and competitive pressure. Any business that fails to prepare for this new reality will soon be competed out of business by rivals who figure out how to make a great profit by doing a better job of earning the trust of their customers.  In this workshop, find out what you need to do to get to the top and stay there.