KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Evangelize Your Clients to Survive

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

SummaryDiscover the essential strategies to not just satisfy clients, but to "evangelize" them into becoming your most powerful brand advocates. This episode reveals how exceptional customer service, authentic communication, and creating a community around your business are key to generating a steady stream of high-quality referrals. Learn to build an emotional connection that transforms your clients into passionate believers who will enthusiastically promote your business, ensuring its long-term survival and success.Bullet Point TakeawaysThe Difference Between Happy & Evangelist: A happy client is content with your service and may recommend you if asked. A client evangelist, however, is so delighted by their experience that they actively and enthusiastically promote your brand to their friends, family, and social networks without being asked.Create an Exceptional, Personalized Experience: The foundation of client evangelism is a remarkable client experience. Learn to go above and beyond by anticipating needs, providing personalized communication, and demonstrating genuine care. This emotional connection is what inspires loyalty and turns a one-time transaction into a lifelong advocate.Leverage the Power of Community & Social Proof: Understand the value of building a community around your brand where clients can connect with each other. This fosters a sense of belonging and strengthens their connection to you. Encourage them to share their positive experiences, as testimonials and user-generated content are more trustworthy than traditional advertising.Offer Incentives & Make It Easy: While evangelists are motivated by passion, an effective strategy includes a formal referral program. Offer incentives like discounts or exclusive event invitations. More importantly, make it effortless for them to share by providing social share buttons on your website and making the referral process as simple as possible.Embrace a Customer-First Mindset: Survival in a competitive market requires a strategic shift. By consistently prioritizing your customers' needs and making every business decision with them in mind, you not only improve their satisfaction but also create a network of advocates who will do your heavy lifting for you, reducing your customer acquisition costs.Topics:Client EvangelismReferral MarketingClient AdvocacyCustomer-First StrategyWord-of-Mouth MarketingCall-to-ActionReady to build a business that thrives on authentic word-of-mouth? Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform and learn how to evangelize your clients for success!

Hello and good afternoon. It's Randy Bird and I want to welcome you to the podcast. Welcome to like a bosspod.com. Podcast on entrepreneurship and business tax that hopefully will help you move ahead. But again, I'm your host, Randy Bird. And today's content I'm really quite passionate about. It's a content that you saw in the title, evangelizing your clients and what that looks like. I do believe this goes a across many brands. This is not just real estate or just lending. It could go on any brand and any business. It doesn't matter if you're a lemonade stand or IBM. In my opinion, the day and age of evangelizing your clients is here to stay and probably not going to go away for quite some time. So what I mean by that, when you look at evangelizing your clients, basically the word evangelism is obviously reference to the church or religion or potentially biblical, but not in the way I'm presenting it.

So here's the definition of evangelism. Evangelism marketing is an advanced form of word-of-mouth marketing in which companies develop customers who believe so strongly in a particular product or service that they freely try to convince others to buy or use it. The customer becomes voluntarily at voluntary advocates actively spreading the word on behalf of the company. And that's a great definition of what's in my brain. And so when you look at evangelizing your clients, it really is more important than ever with

social media and how much noise is in that space. So as I look at evangelizing my clients as you related to real estate or lending specifically, those two categories or spaces are very similar in terms of client follow-up and really getting clients to be absolute advocates for you. So for me, what that looks like is minimum of 30 contacts per year. I know that sounds like a lot for somebody that does nothing now, but track with me a little bit. I'm going to break it down so I can give you tangible things to put into your business. So number one, 30 contacts per year that typically looks like this. Two contacts per month, one in the form of written communication, whether it's email, whether it's a text, whether it's some other kind of written communication.

And one communication per month, depending on the type of customer, physically or verbally. So on the phone, maybe it's a video through bomb bomb, something to put a face to a name and have some contact. There's a lot of systems out there allow you to make this manageable and duplicatable. your business. A couple of them, slide dial is one where you can call 100 people with one particular message. Everybody gets the same message, similar to a bulk email, if you haven't heard of it before. But basically, it sidetracks the phone call and goes right to a voicemail. Others are follow-up systems and follow-up boss, MailChimp, Top Producer, Boomtown, Commission's Inc. There's literally 25 I can probably name. But follow-up systems basically put a automatic follow-up into place to help you stay in

contact with clients. And this doesn't always mean it's AI or automatic. It means that it sometimes is a reminder. So today, today happens to be a Saturday. I'm going through my database. I have about 38 people that my database triggered as I haven't talked to recently or they're on my reminder list to communicate with. And so as I look at my communication list, and I'm leaving this weekend, I've got 36 actually, 35 plus one future. So I'm going to get and go through that list and just make sure I'm making contact with everybody. It could be a text. It could be a phone call, could be sharing a newspaper article, whatever. But if we look at the real estate and lending space specifically, and remember, you can put this into any category of your business. I promise you,

if you put this into plumbing and you're not doing any kind of system now, your plumbing business will absolutely see the benefits from this, maybe a two to five times ROI on this particular task. So I have many, many, I have construction clients that I work and coach with, and I also have many other contracting people that we mentor and talk to about how to engage with their clients. And so when we talk about this, it's really quite popular. look at evangelizing your clients. It's actually been kind of a catchphrase or coined back. Matter of fact, as luck has it, I just Googled it. And September 14th, three years ago, Forbes put out an article said, stop selling and start evangelizing. And I literally didn't know this existed. I just Googled

it as we're speaking and just prior to the podcast. But it basically, exactly. what I'm talking about. Three years ago, Forbes put out. Sales is getting lost in the conversation. Sales Force global customer growth looked at how to evangelize their clients. And she was expressing concern about how marketers seemed to be minimizing the role and importance of sales. Sales is changing. Sales in the old days, if you will, even if you go back 20 years, sales, when it looked like this, you could piss off one or two customers. Nobody knew about those customers. They were just isolated bad customers. Those days are gone with instant reviews and all the reviews online.

A customer's complaint is heard by millions now. So if you're not evangelizing your customers and you're working off the status quo that, hey, if we make some of them happy, you know, whatever, that doesn't work in today's world. With social media, it could be crippling to your business now. So when you look at the idea of being an evangelist or evangelizing, to me, it really means, matter of fact, we did a search on LinkedIn for evangelist, and it produces over 30,000 people holding positions. And by the way, that's outside the religious profession.

These are tech evangelists, corporate evangelists, solution evangelist, name your platform evangelist, right? And that's because this kind of a catchy coin phrase now is being used. widely. So if you haven't heard of it, check it out. I think there's value in it. So now as we're talking about your business specifically, so now you can go in and focus on evangelizing your clients, making them absolute people that are going to talk about you and talk about ways to support and promote your particular business, spreading the word of the company on behalf of the company, like I said earlier. Right. So now picture, this is a great story I heard from Andy

for sell a picture this you got a lemonade stand and you make a lemonade for somebody and it's 50 cents and you're you know you're nine years old whatever the case is that person loves your lemonade they come back for more lemonade now they may do this a hundred times and they may tell everybody that they know about your lemonade but if your service is extraordinary and and over the top service meaning that not only do you sell a lemonade but you also give them a cup that maybe has a brand of your name. Maybe it's, uh, you offer free refills that day. Maybe you offer, uh, you know, a guarantee that if they find better lemonade anywhere, they get their money back. Whatever it is, even in that basic simple level of lemonade stand. Now, let's take it up a notch and, and use this analogy. Let's just say

you sold somebody lemonade for 75 cents. They leave, they get in their car, they spill it. They spill it. They leave it on top of their car, whatever. They come back. You have two choices. You could one say, hey, not my fault, you know, and that's a valid thing. And if you think about it, the restaurant business, the service industries, this happens every day where the customer or the owner takes a stance, hey, it's not my fault. It's your fault. We're not helping you. We're not, we're not fulfilling that promise that we delivered. So in that lemonade stand, you come back and if I had that lemonade stand, I'd refill your lemonade. Matter of fact, I'd say, can I buy a friend of yours lemonade for your trouble, right? Your trouble. You spilled it. You spilled it.

You're the dummy that put it on the trunk of your car, whatever. But I'm evangelizing you as a client. You're likely to go out and tell 10 friends about this experience. Maybe it's one friend. Usually positive, you tell one or two. Negative you tell 10. Remember that ratio. So now you just fast forward to the bad entrepreneur of this lemonade stand.

A little nine-year-old Jimmy. Customer walks up and said, hey, I bought a lemonade earlier and I spilt it. And Jimmy says, hey, not our problem. You know, we delivered the goods. You got to buy a new one. And the customer either reluctantly buys another one and grumbles all the way out. And it's not Jimmy's fault. It's not little Jimmy lemonade stands fault.

It's the customer. But the relationships forever changed. He's likely not to recommend Jimmy. And then that customer leaves, he could love that lemonade. Picture that, loving the lemonade, but still having a bitter taste in your mouth. And it's not from the lemons. It's from your bad business. So this is a great example, in my opinion, of how simple you could break this down for.

Now, fast forward into the restaurant business. I have ordered meals. I was just recently in Salem with a friend of mine, visited a very nice hotel with a very nice restaurant inside of it, fireplace, you know, very nice open bar, first class, in my opinion. I ordered two or three appetizers and we ordered, we weren't drinking because we're on 75. hard and it's been in the last two weeks but um we ordered mocktails and whatever so food came out and they really really boasted on one particular thing which was a waggo beef um it wasn't a burger it was kind of like patties basically and it was steak bites effectively with waggo beef well my mouth

was watering thinking about how awesome this was going to be and upon getting them i took one or two bites and realized they were no flavor. They just had no flavor that was just like frankly eating, I don't know, leather with no flavor. They were soft. They were tender. They were amazing, but had no flavor. Could have been my sinuses from allergies. It could have been, you know, my, my palate has totally been changing with the hard 75 diet and all the different things, no alcohol, everything else. But bottom line, I didn't eat any. I ate three or four pieces out of maybe 30 or 40 pieces that came in this particular dish, good-sized dish. But the bottom line, it was obvious that I did not enjoy it.

So the waitress, when she came to pick it up, she just picked it up, didn't say anything. And I didn't say anything either. I wasn't going to ask for a credit on something that I ordered. So we went about our thing. She asked, she goes, I'm sorry, can I get you anything else? And I said, no, we're okay. You know, it kind of got filled up. We ordered more than we really needed to anyway.

And so, no big deal. Well, when she brought me my bill, guess what? see evangelized me as a client and let me tell you how she said i didn't ask i didn't want to embarrass you at the table or i didn't want to bring it up but i noticed you only ate a couple pieces of it so i don't i don't believe that you enjoyed that dish um she didn't recommend it i brought it up i ordered it she said i did know oh she asked if i wanted a box for it that's what it was she asked if i wanted a boxed for it to go and i said no thank you i'm good and she just gracefully took it back to the kitchen. Well, upon getting my bill, she made comment that she noticed I didn't want a box,

so I must not have enjoyed it that much. And I said, I didn't enjoy it that much. It just didn't have that much flavor for me, but I appreciate you acknowledging that. She goes, I took the liberty to take it off your bill. We want you to be happy. And if you don't enjoy something here, we don't think you should pay for it. Now, she obviously probably had to go to a manager to get approval. All this happened behind the scenes. Maybe she made that, that recommendation on her own. And I don't know the exact number, so I want to live in integrity, but I want to say our bill was maybe $48. So a customary tip being 18, I do 20%. So that would have been just about $10. Call it $9, $9.50, $10. Guess what I did with that $12 plate that she took back without asking me. Yes, I added that amount to the tip because of the way she handled herself. Not only did she make a 40% tip now, basically. She also earned a raving fan. She evangelized me as a client and she did not know it. That was my

very first visit to this particular restaurant in Salem, Oregon. So that is a prime example of evangelizing your clients in a restaurant, atmosphere, or area. How many times have you seen owners or servers defend the fact that the dish was fine? Defend the fact that it was hot enough. Defend the fact that it was good enough or everybody else loves it. It doesn't matter. It's the personal experience of that particular customer. And the cost acquisition of that customer is extremely high with advertising and signage and everything else. But she had me. She knew it. And she did an amazing job, a level 10, no compromise job on evangelizing me. Guess what? As soon as I think about Salem, and by the way, she's right around the movie theater that we really enjoy a sit-down movie

a theater that you could order food at and have tables and stuff, that's guaranteed to be on my stop. It's guaranteed to be on my list. And next time, I'm probably going to have a higher ticket. I'll have a $100 ticket because I'll order dinner and drinks, whatever it may be. So that's a great example of evangelizing your clients. I hope you've enjoyed the show today. But I want to leave you three tasks, if you will, or opportunities as we leave the call and leave the podcast. I always want to focus on things that will bring you value and what you're getting out of this podcast. So number one, what's your current policy for returned items or to evangelist? Let's leave it this.

What's your current policy in your business with unhappy customers or returned items? It doesn't matter if you're a hot dog stand or a restaurant or realtor. If somebody is expressing concerns, what is your way of overcoming that to evangelize your clients? Give that some thought and write down your plan for that. And if you don't have one, maybe we can develop a plan. Number two, what is your follow-up system? What are you doing to evangelize your clients? You know, there's a major transformation going over in real estate and lending now,

mainly real estate with, you know, the big companies, Zillow, Redfin, Compass, Open Door, all these translate into disruptors for the market. Well, what are you going to do to circle the wagons around your clients and keep the wolves at bay? Because that's really what's happening. And I'm not talking bad about any company. I'm just saying it's coming. It's happening.

There's incredible pressure for flat fee and reduced commissions. And I don't do that. I focus on providing level 10 service. Let's go back to that restaurant for a minute on this particular subject. If she came back and gave me one or two dollars off, would she evangelized me? No, I don't think so. It would have been a good gesture, but it wouldn't have been evangelizing. What about if she just brought up that I fact, I didn't like it next time if I came in?

She could have given me a gift certificate for a free dessert on the next trip. That's a great hook, by the way, to get you back in. She could have evangelized me with that. So what are you doing in your real estate business and lending business and any so proprietor, entrepreneurial business to evangelize the clients you already have. I suggest you develop a written plan of having at least 30 contacts a year if you're in the space that I'm talking about, real estate lending, title, that kind of thing, because the options are plentiful and they're going to leave you if you're not in touch with them that much. And it may be a normal business

environment where you're a plumber, electrician, contractor, carpet cleaner, pool cleaner, you're an Uber driver, whatever it is, think about ways to put a system in place where you're touching them once a month, 12 times a year. And if you have your A clients, maybe that's an opportunity for you to really step it up and do client parties and invite them to dinner and coffee and so on, really evangelizing your clients. And then the third is making a list of your clients in an ABC format. A is your absolute best clients that are evangelized and follow you. You know, I got a client. of mine, actually, we didn't even do business together. We had a personal deal together. Her name is Connie, and she is like one of my biggest fans. I love her dearly. If you're listening, you'll know who you are. Connie, I love you. She literally comments and posts and likes and loves on everything I do. And I have another dozen or two dozen clients that are the same way. That is strictly evangelizing your friends and client base. What about if you got to 50 evangelized clients or 100, You know, there's a lot of studies that if you have 100 evangelized clients, that's all you need in your business because they will give you all the business you need.

So number three on the to-do list, if you will today, is developing an ABC list for your clients. And the goal is to evangelize everybody to be in an A client. So a B client is somebody that maybe you haven't done enough business with to evangelize or you haven't reached out enough to give them an opportunity to become a raving fan. And the C is everybody else in your database that has an opportunity to do business with you. So that may be a mailing list. It may be a circle dial. Let's say you do a plumbing job on a house and you get a postcard sent out to 100 houses around that house. And then you're looking for business.

All those people go into a C database within your sphere of influence. And then you market them. Maybe it's once a month with some item of value. And then as they reach out to you for business and or they refer you, they become B clients. And then as you do work for them and they give you a five-star review or you have a way to communicate with them, they become a client. And that is an evangelized client. And that's the ones that you stay in the most contact with.

You do the most for. And they're the ones you invite to client parties, getaways, send gift certificates, send thank you, send Christmas cards and imitations. So hopefully you find value in this podcast today. I think this is great content for you to develop and put in an institute into your business right away. I hope you enjoyed it. For those that can see me on the YouTube channels, this is Randy Bird saying goodbye for the day, but I hope you've enjoyed it. Likeabosspod.com is my podcast. And also the website will be live soon that I have a lot of great

content, all the shows to be there, as well on iTunes and some of the others. So with that, thank you for being here. Thank you for being part of my show today. And I really, I really value you and appreciate you. So hopefully there's something that we can do to lend value. And again, if you like what you saw and there's any way that we can help you, tell one or two friends about the show and let us know what that looks like to help you down the road. But if you got value, tell somebody about it. You plus two, them plus two, the show grow like crazy. Have a great day. It's Randy Bird out for now. And thank you for coming. All right. Bye for now.