6 Ways to Invest in Your Employees and Create a Sustainable Word-of-Mouth Marketing Machine.

Employees are your company’s most important asset*. Employees make or break your brand. They create, design, build and deliver your products and services. They find new ways to save money, new ways to build new products and services. They make customers happy or not. They know customers needs and wants.

Customers may show a product from your company to their friends; talk about how cool and wonderful it is. But it’s your employee and their success creating that product that your customer is sharing with their friend.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, customers talk about your employees, not your products, not your ‘brand’ and not your ad agency. 

Word-of-mouth marketing, referral marketing, viral or buzz marketing ultimately is employee-buzz marketing. 

And word-of-mouth marketing is the most cost-efficient, sustainable, form of marketing.

To create a sustainable word-of-mouth marketing machine you want:

• your customers to talk more about... your employees
• your customers to talk to more of their friends about your employees

Here are 6 ways to invest in your employees and create a sustainable word-of-mouth marketing machine.

Hire A-Talent. Hire the best available talent. You get what you pay for applies to your employees, too. Your current employees will feel valued and inspired as you hire the best talent to help them continue to create, design, build and deliver products that add to their self-esteem and the customer’s happiness.

I’ve written a short ebook, The Collaborative Hiring Process, that’s free for you to download. It incorporates my experience using the Topgrading interview process for success 100% of the time.

Upgrade Your Talent. Invest in the necessary training, coaching, mentoring needed to grow them as your company grows. That creates a mutual value-added proposition.

And, find the new talent that will sustain your growth.

Give Them the Resources. Give them the resources they need to achieve their goals, sustain their passion, inspire them to grow more. That includes the right desks, comfortable chairs, lighting, dual monitors, clean offices, as well as the right technology (software, hardware).

Make It Simple. One purpose, one priority. A house divided cannot stand. More than one goal only serves to weaken the progress towards both. As CEO, we agreed that these were: make ‘em happy and answer their calls immediately. That meant make the customer and/or prospects happy, as they defined it. And that was made meaningful by answering their calls immediately.

Recognize and Reward. Say ‘thank you.’ It’s so simple, so easy, so inexpensive to do. Its impact is so profound on the passion, the inspiration, the motivation of the recipient. Say it immediately as Tim Berry suggests. Say it front of their peers, as I suggest. Recognition by managers among your peers and recognition by your peers is a powerful reward and motivator. It’s also free. But judging from some parsimonious uses of this reward, two words in effect, among the business world you would think it was more expensive than our national debt. It’s not. It’s two words. Thank you. Say them, show them.

Listen. Your employees are your best source of knowledge of what they need, what they can deliver. Your customers depend on them for your solutions to their problems. You trust them with your company. Trust them with your heart and ears and mind. Listen to them.

Just 6 steps. Most require little to no additional financial expense. Any additional expense is easily replaced with savings is easily recaptured by a sustainable marketing campaign that results in lower employee turnover, lower hiring costs (your employees’ will be your recruiters), higher conversion rates from word-of-mouth referrals, lower customer churn, increased cross and up-selling and better cash-flows.

That last one makes you king.

* The truth of that is so obvious I’m almost embarrassed to remind you. But when you look at the limited success of many companies you find many executives and leaders who have forgotten this truism that surrounds them.