Seth Godin has an interesting comment in his post from yesterday. You can read his whole post here.
But what I thought was interesting was his comment that less than 1% of your customers will be willing to spread your word through word of mouth marketing. Now, that’s a lower number than I’ve seen in the past and if true, means the typical salesperson or small business owner trying to build their business with word of mouth marketing as one of their primary marketing methods is destined to fail.
The report Seth cites is regarding on-line marketing–but it isn’t that difficult, knowing human nature, to extrapolate that into the ‘real’ world. However, even if we assume that customers in the real world are 10 times more likely to spread your word for you than on-line customers (probably a bad assumption in itself), you still only have 10% of your client base working to help you build your business.
Nevertheless, as I pointed out in my post, by converting from word of mouth marketing to referrals, you can build a business through your database of clients and customers.
