Create natural customer advocates.
Engage employees.
Think like a startup.
Customers are CRUSHING growth objectives.
So can yours.
GO TO MARKET
OnePlus's Customer Community co-created its first phone and evangelized it to the market.
Result: $300M sales in first year; $330 marketing spend.
RETENTION
SAS Canada's "Customer Champions" restored retention rates by organizing 20 live events in 13 cities that drew 2,000 customers.
Result: Retention rates restored from 83% to mid-94-96%. No marketing spend needed.
MARKET SHARE
Zoom relied entirely on natural customer advocacy in its first two years (no marketing spend.) Despite being late to the industry, Zoom's market share today leads all competitors combined.
Customers are CRUSHING growth objectives.
So can yours.
ACQUISITION
Early Salesforce ($440M rev.) "closed" 80% of prospects at its live events, simply by making it easy for prospects to talk to customers—no sales pitch required.
COSTS
Microsoft’s customer community, led by its "MVPs," cut support costs by $100s M—and improved support satisfaction scores.
INNOVATION
LEGO's 1000+ developer-customers created a robot that could solve a Rubik cube and other monster hits that internal developers couldn't match—a harbinger of Lego's return to profitability and triumph over Sony's internally designed robotics.
The Disruptors
Disrupting firms-–and even whole industries—is the ultimate low-hanging fruit in our hyperconnected world. Especially industries that persist with annoying, crappy customer experiences while your firm resolves to be Customer-led. Like these:
DISRUPTING 1
Appalled by Facebook’s abuse of users, WhatsApp’s social media platform countered with respect. Their platform rejected things like targeted ads and damaging algorithms for their users. Meanwhile it embraced end-to-end message encryption to ensure user privacy—which Facebook never considered. RESULT: Despite Facebook’s early start and huge lead, WhatsApp reached 450M users in just five years—which so threatened Mark Zuckerberg that he offered an eye popping $19 billion for WhatsApp’s platform.
DISRUPTING 2
A perennial laggard when CEO John Legere joined T-Mobile in 2012, its market cap was a paltry $3B. AT&T’s and Verizon’s were $150B+. Legere vowed to attack the leaders’ appalling customer practices with an “Un-carrier” strategy.” T-Mobile eliminated: Binding contracts. International roaming charges. Hidden fees. Etc., etc. RESULT: By 2022, T-Mobile had the industry’s top Net Promotor Score. And its market cap exploded 60x to $180B—neck-and-neck with AT&T and Verizon.
DISRUPTING 3
Despite Elon Musk’s erratic image, he’s a disciplined, customer-led CEO. With Tesla, his focus is on disrupting the crappy customer experience long entrenched in the auto industry. No more nerdy electric cars: Musk made them cool. Dealership rip-offs are out—Tesla has “stores” that amplify the cars' amazing customer experiences. He spends little on marketing, relying on natural customer advocates who love to share their experience. RESULT: Tesla’s market value leads the industry by 3x, as of this writing (Oct. 2022).
The Disruptors
Disrupting firms-–and even whole industries—is the ultimate low-hanging fruit in our hyperconnected world. Especially industries that persist with annoying, crappy customer experiences while your firm resolves to be Customer-led. Like these:
DISRUPTING 4
When he started Vanguard, Jack Bogle upended Wall Street’s long history of abusing investors. Bogle had one metric: provide the best possible investments for its investors/ customers—what a concept! Vanguard had no growth goals for the firm. No commissioned salespeople. It cut costs relentlessly and passed them along to customers. This new concept was ridiculed by Wall Street. RESULT: Today, Vanguard is the second largest mutual fund in the world.
AVOIDING DISRUPTION
Data storage provider Rackspace looked like toast when giants like AWS and Google entered the space. Senior leaders were at a loss. Instead, the firm's response came from innovative, marquee customers like Southwest Airlines and Fidelity—who kept requesting new services that the giants weren’t providing, like expanded engineering support, providing network security, etc. RESULT: Rackspace survived, attracted investors, and as of this writing are preparing to go public again.
DISRUPTING 5
Muhammad Yunus established the first successful microlending bank, Grameen, in Bangladesh in 1983. He solved one of his biggest challenges by engaging his customers—tiny business owners in poor villages—to perform labor-intensive banking services like credit checks for new borrowers and managing loan collections. How? Yunus formed the bank’s borrowers into an advisory board to perform such functions. RESULT: 23 years later, the bank won a Nobel Prize with 7M borrowers served with $9B loans, with average loan defaults at just 1/10 of other banks in Bangladesh.
Bill Lee can help.
"Bill is a pioneer of the 21st Century Customer Relationship." Chris Adlard, co-founder and co-author, The Customer Catalyst
Bill created the categories of Customer Advocacy and Engagement and the metric, Return on Relationship™—the foundations of Customer Marketing.
Built a global community around these concepts, including Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Box, Marketo, HubSpot, Palo Alto Networks, AWS, SAS, Siemens, Subaru of America and dozens of others using our educational, research and advisory services.
HBR articles include: Marketing is Dead, Things Customers Can Do Better Than You, The Right Way to Hire Your Customers and more.
Founded longest running (16 years), most respected customer engagement conference in the world, the Summit on Customer Engagement, held in Silicon Valley.
In 2020, Bill co-founded the Roundtable for a Customer Revolution with eight titans of the customer engagement–like Nick Mehta, Carol Meyers, Jake Sorofman and others. Since then it's grown into a decade-long movement for revolutionizing and simplifying the customer relationship to achieve Customer-Led Growth.
JOIN THE REVOLUTIONCLIENTS
Highly recommended. Bill’s Roundtable generated Incredible perspectives from some of the smartest senior leaders and investors in business. His passion for the future of the customer is provocative and inspiring. Nick Mehta, CEO, Gainsight
Bill leads one of the most interesting communities of customer-led professionals I’ve seen. His book, The Hidden Wealth of Customers (HBR), has innovative frameworks—such as “AIC” customers—critical for today’s C-suites. Bill Peppers (Author)
With Bill’s guidance, we thought deeply and spoke frankly about the barriers to customer centricity, and developed radical, research-based strategies to overcome them. Carol Meyers (Independent Board Director, Growth Advisor)
Under Bill's leadership, now is the time for customer advocacy and engagement managers to up-level your thinking about all the ways that customers can grow the business. And be bold—people like me want you to tell us these things. Martin Haering (CMO, Finastra)
Bill is a true visionary in the emerging world of Customer Marketing. There are few people I know who are as passionate and dedicated to the culture and practice of building your customer advocates into your most important flywheel for driving profitable growth. Jake Sorofman (CMO, Visier)
Bill is a pioneer of the 21st century customer relationship. Chris Adlard (Author)
The value was unbelievable. If we’d had this knowledge when we first started, we’d be in a better place today when it comes to customer excellence. Vickie Cooney (VP, Market Development, AmerisourceBergen)
When it comes to developing high-impact customer relationships, I found out very quickly that all roads on that issue lead to Bill Lee. Jackie Breiter (VP, Customer Success CA Technologies)
Bill is leading a revolution in the way that customers take us to market and build our business. Sarah Davis (Director of Customer Marketing, Invoca)
Bill gets us out of the day-to-day demands from stakeholders and into our customers’ potential to grow the business. Genevieve Guerette (Director of Customer Marketing, App Annie)
The Vision
Customers want you to connect them to other customers throughout the customer journey.
1. So, Build an ACI Customer Community
2. Get great at connecting your AIC customers to crush growth objectives.
ADVOCACY
Traditional marketing and Sales are dying. You need customers who provide natural advocacy, word of mouth, evangelism: Customers who create an ongoing movement in your market.
IDEAS & INNOVATION
Your best resource for strategy? Strategic customers. For innovation? Innovative customers. The notion that customers can't provide such input is another common misconception about human potential.
CUSTOMER OUTCOMES
Customers struggling with adoption, expansion or renewal in the post-sale often want to connect with other customers like them to "show them the ropes"—just like buyers do in the pre-sale. You want a customer base that excels at that.
The Plan
You can start connecting customers right away to impact and crush critical growth objectives.
Here’s how we can help. Customizations include Advisory, internal Workshops, external Roundtables, and Research.
The
Start Now!
Sprint
120 days to a
Customer-Led
Enterprise
Implement with
Cathedral
Builders
Dare to be
Legendary
Why wait? The customer base of a viable firm has 30% or more promoters or loyal customers.
Instead of focusing on detractors, why not insert your promoters–who already love you–into critical growth challenges?
The CEO’s best leverage point is to build emotional bonds with customers and employees.
That requires a purpose that’s about improving customers lives in some significant way–and then living that purpose.
That’s the foundation for unlocking immense customer value.
Your customer-impacting employees should see the bigger picture of:
Living the purpose of the business.
Engaging and connecting your best customers to meet and crush strategic objectives.
Rather than subordinate your best customers to traditional marketing and sales motions.
A new offering for companies who want to become legendary—to create a legacy like Nike, Apple, Vanguard…
Plan
Start connecting customers right away to impact and crush growth objectives. Here’s how we can help.
Customizations include Advisory, internal Workshops, external Roundtables, and Research.
The Start Now! Sprint
Why wait? The customer base of a viable firm has 30% or more promoters or loyal customers.
Instead of focusing on detractors, why not connect the promoters who already love you into critical growth challenges?
120 days to a Customer-Led Enterprise
The CEO’s best leverage point is to build emotional bonds with customers and employees.
That requires a purpose that’s about improving customers lives in some significant way–and then living it.
That’s the foundation for realizing immense customer value.
Implement with Cathedral Builders
Your customer-impacting employees should see the bigger picture of:
Living the purpose of the business.
Engaging and connecting your best customers to meet and crush strategic objectives.
Rather than subordinate great customers to traditional marketing and sales motions.
Dare to be Legendary
A new offering for companies who want to become legendary—to create a legacy like Nike, Apple, Vanguard…