The Raving Fan Factory - Residential Systems

It’s easy to lose sight of a simple reality inside the CI space: A happy customer will tell three people, while unhappy customers will tell nine. When we spend all our time chasing new customers (selling the proverbial “dog food”), we can fall prey to ignoring the end result (how the dog food tastes). In straight economic terms, creating a raving fan costs practically nothing because we’re already working with labor already set aside to finish the job. It’s just a matter of optimizing those resources. Shifting to a culture of “Finish Strong” has a huge payoff, with raving fans easily worth five times more than a “merely satisfied” customer. Let’s explore what it takes to reorient our mindset from selling new business to manufacturing new raving fans.

Integrators tend to focus disproportionately on lead generation, deal flow, and top-line growth. Further, as our businesses scale, we find out quickly that what got us here won’t get us there. We celebrate jobs sold, but not necessarily delighted customers. Closed won business is tempting to celebrate because it’s so easy to measure. In a culture that is hyper-focused on the top of the funnel vs. what’s coming out the other side, we can inadvertently end up producing some lousy-tasting dog food and find out about it only after it’s too late.

Merely satisfying a customer won’t grow your business. Satisfied customers are quiet, while raving fans are loud. The headwinds toward this shift involve unwinding cultural norms around how we keep score. No one will ask you at the happy hour about raving fans. When someone asks, “How’s business?” they’re really asking about revenue. For us to change our thinking, we have to change the scorecard. Becoming a raving fan factory means defining what a raving fan looks like, measuring progress weekly, and encouraging all members of the team to lean in together.

Implementing

We can’t manufacture raving fans unless we can easily discern what they look like. Common hallmarks of a raving fan include willingness to host events at their home, participation in case studies, or unsolicited introductions to friends and family.

Let’s unpack each of these traits:

Unsolicited referrals — Develop a referral program inside your business to make it easy for customers to send new business your way. Feeding these opportunities into your CRM means they can now be easily measured.
Leaves glowing public reviews — Another easy-to-measure metric. Ask each of your clients face-to-face for a review at the end of each job. Four- or 5-star reviews should be responded to immediately, and anything 3 stars or below gets a phone call from a manager to address the friction quickly.
Forgives small mistakes — You’re going to screw up occasionally, and raving fans will let you slide. Don’t use this as a crutch, but these are the people who will always assume good intent first. There’s an old saying that goes, “When you don’t like someone, you can’t stand the way they hold their fork. When you like them, they could spill their entire dinner in your lap and you’d laugh.”
Chooses you again (even if you’re not the cheapest) — Another easy metric to measure. A customer coming back for more drives down your customer acquisition cost substantially.

For “Finish Strong” to work, each team member needs to feel connected to manufacturing raving fans. In some ways, that’s the beauty of building a raving fan factory vs. a sales-focused organization. Sales-obsessed organizations exclude vast swaths of the company from believing they have anything to do with driving success. A raving fan factory can draw a straight line from any department (accounting, purchasing, system design, or project management) to the raving fan experience. This shift in stance from reactive to proactive focuses on controlling the controllables and will make the initiative relatable to everyone as opposed to a select few.

Also by Henry Clifford: Winning by Waiting

Nothing will kill a project or an initiative faster than making it overly complex. Here’s a “no new tools” framework that can sit on top of what you’re already doing:

The Raving Fan Scorecard Template

Place the following categories at the top of each column:

Week Ending: Enter the date.
# of 5-Star Google Reviews: Count only new reviews posted that week.
# of Reviews Mentioning Staff by Name: Count how many of those reviews include a team member’s name.
# of Referred Leads: Count new leads that came from a past client or were marked as a referral.
# of Repeat Clients: Count clients who closed a new job this week and have had work done before.
Total Fan Score: Add up the columns for a single weekly total. Set your targets around measuring the current 30-day trailing average score and setting growth goals from there.

Best Practices:

Kick off a quarterly “Ownership Thinking”-style Rapid Improvement Plan around creating raving fans. Assign a lifetime value to a newly created raving fan and create tiers around the value created to develop a self-funded incentive plan.
Update the scorecard every Friday.
Review weekly with the team in a huddle or all-hands meeting.
Use the score to spot trends and share raving fan stories.
Create rituals around reflection: Ask, “Did we create one today?” during huddle calls, check-ins, and all-hands meetings.

Here’s the rub: If you do nothing, nothing bad will happen right away. Instead of being fired, however, you just won’t get asked to do the next thing. By choosing to become a raving fan factory, you’re racing in clean air and delivering customer experiences that are head and shoulders above anything your competitors are cranking out. Over time, both approaches (Finish Strong vs. Status Quo) will impact your business. One path leads to customers worth five times more than your current set, while the other path leads to mediocrity.