Keep Creating Advocates for Your Business

Advocates are customers who praise you to others. You might think that if you increase the number of Advocates by, let's say, 10%, this would lead at best to about a 10% increase in sales. In reality, though, according to research reported in Harvard Business Review, the effect of creating new Advocates is much greater than that.

• You create Advocates by maintaining a welcoming shopping environment where your customers love to be. The result is that Advocates spend more time with you, and this makes it more likely they'll buy more products.
• Advocates are people who appreciate you and your staff for meeting their service expectations. Advocates want your business to succeed. If they see something they know they could buy at another store or website for a bit less, they still prefer to give their money to you.
• Advocates want to help you out. They'll tell family and friends, and even shoppers they come across in your store or in competing stores, what a good job you do. If they hear criticisms of your business, they want to reassure themselves they're right in their feelings, so they'll talk down the criticisms.

     It's no surprise then, that when you increase the number of Advocates by the 10%, you can easily realize a much greater increase in sales. In the before-and-after chart at the top of this posting, the gold bars plot the number of Advocates the retailer has created and the green bars plot the retailer's sales per square foot.
     Have I convinced you of the value of developing more Advocates? Then now is the time to start pumping it up with your staff!