What's Your Social Proofed Flywheel?
Who vouches for you? I’m not talking about the logos on your website, I’m talking about who would behind-closed-doors recommends you? That’s the true metric of success. In an industry that has immeasurable social proof, are you winning the trust of your customer to the point where they would recommend you (and your company) without your intervention? In real estate, the network effects of reputation are everything and if your prospective customer can’t feel comfortable that their peers would choose you, then why should they?
Whether you sell hardware, software or a service to a single industry, it’s extremely important to know your spheres of influence for your buyer. Your customer is a vertical expert and often relies on their contemporaries to make decisions that offset decision making risk. For example at Xeal, where we sell a hardware/software solution and we need to know which sphere of influence is our buyer going to lean on to make their decision.
When we speak to a developer, we often will share with them the other developers that build in their metro area to show the social proof and offer to connect the dots to that customer - nothing wins more than local relevance. For our private equity clients, we will often share the names of those other groups and to the extent possible, name drop a couple individuals to truly get them comfortable that we are not just regurgitating a logo, credibility is everything. When we met a CEO, we’re doing our best to share the names of other CEO’s that know and like us. Almost more important than your product or service is what echelon of client and customer community is your new client joining. They care about this!
Social proofing your business and introducing a customer community is a flywheel. The beauty of some industries is that you have a main flywheel and offshoot spinners.
Here’s the routine yet ideal flywheel ( » = leads to)
Win great loyal customers » Referring you to other great customers » Allowing you to grow and fund your business to improve your product or service » Continuing to improve your ability to satisfy your customers » Winning more great loyal customers (To infinity and beyond!)
Here’s a Xeal three-pronged approach to enter into the flywheel:
We win a new real estate landlord or operator logo that’s chosen Xeal as their preferred EV charging partner » Customer uses a third-party property management company which gets onboarded onto our platform » Customer’s investors are also investors in other real estate investments » Xeal team now has three (3) new happy touch points for which it can incentivize referrals, find new opportunities and create the ‘routine’ flywheel of customer appreciation and thus organic business growth.
While real estate is likely not unique with it’s numerous stakeholders that touch the paying customer, I do find that the network affects of relevance are extremely strong. Our customers are social animals by nature and they have to make thousands of decisions that impact their financial outcome of their building. They can’t be experts on everything so they’re often relying on their peers to help derisk the decisions.
Whether you’re selling to real estate owners or you’re selling to corporate accountants, keeping your customers happy and connecting the dots of who your customer respects is a surefire way of creating credibility and growing your business. Does your industry have strong or weak social proof networks? Does your business have its flywheel spinning yet or are you still working to energize it to spin?