MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

My ques­tion to Brad Antin, because Centerpointe’s results are absolutely amaz­ing, was –how do they get there? How do you get a lot of back end sales?

Brad Antin gave me 2 key insights. First, he told me: CUSTOMER DELIGHT.

Cus­tomer Delight

If peo­ple are rav­ing about you, they’ll buy from you again.

The equa­tion is that sim­ple. And, how do you get a lot of refer­rals? Same equa­tion. If peo­ple love you, they’ll keep buy­ing from you, and they’ll want to share it.

How do we get peo­ple to love us –to love our prod­ucts and ser­vices more? That’s a ques­tion we need to start ask­ing our­selves way more than we used to.

We have a list of 11 items inte­grated into our core Mind­Val­ley DNA, and cus­tomer delight seems to carry a lot more weight than we’ve ever realized.

On the front end, we have as much as Cen­ter­pointe does. Com­pared to them, how­ever, we still seem like tiny ama­teurs… BUT, we can quickly and eas­ily close that gap. When we get to that cru­cial point of cus­tomer delight, peo­ple will buy from us, repeatedly.

They told me the for­mula, and it’s very sim­ple, too: do some­thing unex­pected. And then do it a few more times.

When peo­ple buy a prod­uct from you and you deliver the prod­uct that you’d told them they’d get –great. You’ve done what they expected. That doesn’t build cus­tomer enthu­si­asm. You have to go above and beyond their expectations.

How­ever, hear­ing this from Brad Antin is very dif­fer­ent from expe­ri­enc­ing what cus­tomer delight is really about.

Good advice is too easy to ignore if you just read about it on a blog post, but because the results from Cen­ter­pointe are remark­able, I decided to pur­chase the Cen­ter­pointe prod­uct to find out exactly what I would experience.

I bought their prod­uct, they shipped it to Malaysia, and it was exactly what was adver­tised. It didn’t really look much more than the $180 prod­uct it was. I thought to myself, ok –why do peo­ple love them so much? I found out why, 2 weeks later…

Because, 2 weeks later, I got a book in the mail from FedEx, shipped all the way from the States. I thought to myself, “Wow!” I mean boy, was I happy! I mean it –I really was, because who ever in my life, after I’ve bought some­thing, thought to just send me a book 2 weeks later?

Not one com­pany, except Cen­ter­pointe, has ever done that in my entire life. It’s mem­o­rable. It got me to know them…because it was just awe­some and it made me feel great. I love them.

Now, as if that wasn’t enough, 2 weeks AFTER that, they sent me another enve­lope and this time, I get a bonus prod­uct. It’s a CD, and they say, “Here you go, we think this will help you.” At this point I was floored, and I felt like any­thing they wanted me to buy I would, because I just love them.

That’s how you want ALL your cus­tomers to feel.

To impro­vise on Alex Mandossian’s advice, I’d say the for­mula is “Give –give –give –unex­pect­edly –then ask.” The unex­pected giv­ing is cru­cial because if you say, “give me $10 and I’ll give you my prod­uct”, it won’t work. An equal exchange won’t delight and it won’t build an enthusiast.

It’s pretty easy and, obvi­ous. When you delight your cus­tomers, they begin to love you and they become your fan. When you offer your them your next prod­uct after you’ve already won their hearts and minds, they’re going to buy your stuff. Why? Because they don’t know the other stuff on the mar­ket, it seems risky and unknown com­pared to yours.

There’s still more from my dis­cus­sions on Centerpointe’s strate­gies with Brad Antin.

In the mean­time, I just want to drive home the fact that we all need to get to where these guys are. In what ways do you think you can start to delight your cus­tomers? Let’s fig­ure out cus­tomer delight, because based on how well Centerpointe’s doing, it’s worth it.

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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