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Tip of the Week: The Great Doubling (Business Tutorial)
Written by Jimmy
We are allowed 11 minutes over pizza each Saturday to talk about the ‘business’ end of things. That is about right of time. We tend to discuss three topics: the ‘Great Doubling’, the ‘Digital Space’ and Africa. This covers the first…
So, here’s all you need to know about the great doubling in 6 points (in case you haven’t noticed, I really like bullet points… and by the way I don’t have six points yet, but am confident that i’ll get there by typing really fast and before the caffiene wears off):
- Business is all about customer advocacy. Jargon alert. What that means is business is really simple – the goal of business is to find a customer, get them to try your product, come back again, and every once in a while invite a friend. ‘Advocates’ or ‘Promoters’ are folks that answer 9 or 10 to the following questions: ‘On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?’ You really do want folks to answer 10 on that. And you really don’t want them to answer below 7. Big raging debates about all this, but most people think this question is far better than a ‘satisfaction’ question because it puts skin in game. If I ask you ‘are you satisfied with Jimmy’s singing on Big Old Bird’, you’re probably more worried about offending me, so will score my singing highly. If you’re asked ‘how likely are you to recommend Jimmy’s singing to a friend?’ you’ll probably be more honest because now you’re thinking — Oh Lord, I could lose a friend if I told them to listen to that god awful moaning. So it’s a good test. And it turns out whole businesses are driven off of this stuff … in fact, companies that grow sustainably and profitably over decades have twice the number of promoters in their industry… Fred Reicheld is the Godfather of Consumer Loyalty and Advocacy and he’s worth a read!
- So the goal of any business should be to create promoters and avoid detractors. Really, the goal of business is to have people tattoo your brand onto their bodies. Like this:
Or this:
And you want to avoid detractors. People that hate you. The facts here are interesting. If you are a promoter you tell 3 people, ‘Oh man, check out this cool website.’ But if you are a detractor you tell 6 people! Makes sense. It is far more fun to tell horror stories than good stories as we know. See:
And, if you have a terrible experience AND the company recovers, you tell 9 people. So, don’t screw up, but if you do, make up and kiss. After fight sex is good.
- Which is why all we want to do with Abubilla Music is create a few promoters. We’d really like you to tattoo our logo on you somewhere. But even if you don’t, we’re trying to find just a couple folks that get what we do. And like the community, DIY thing. And like that songs are characters that develop over time, and send postcards out to fans to let them know how they’re doing, long before arrival. And like that we invite you to participate in the grand experiment and confess we don’t know what we’re doing but having so much fun doing it badly. And ultimately that we’re going to sort out how to do good with this thing…
- And so the Great Doubling. We’ve set a tiny little goal to double our ‘fans’, our ‘advocates’, our ‘promoters’ every two months. We started the year with 6. The band. We certainly didn’t presume partners or families were on board — St Kathy and Kids are still in the detractor range. And so we needed to be at 12 by end of Feb. And now we have 4 new musicians, 3 new partners and the beginning of the Voices gang and the Jam Jar gang. These gangs aren’t casual visitors because they now are part of it. They get to shape the bit experiment and change who we are. Every couple months we’ll let you know where we are. The doubling gets decidedly harder come next year!
- And it was true, I didn’t have 6 points. Only four. Which is I guess a point in and of itself.
- But still doesn’t get me to six, does it?
Sorted!