Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones

FUSING THE FUNNEL

Whereas BSN emerged as a fairly self-contained internal initiative, the real upside lies in connecting employees with customers. Once you successfully activate an internal flipped funnel, it doesn’t take too much of a leap of faith to connect with one’s customers. BSN has an outside-in web interface called Best Buy Connect that allows customers to follow blog postings, tweets, and employee discussions that otherwise would have remained inside the company. Barry Judge, Best Buy’s openly tweeting Chief Marketing Officer, stresses this need to be transparent in order to build trust. BSN has helped achieve this from the inside out.

The company has since launched Twelpforce, a Twitter-based service that essentially links Best Buy customers to potentially every single blueshirt via a singular Twitter profile, http://twitter.com/twelpforce, an account that essentially aggregates the individual accounts of the various blueshirts (Figure 9.2). Pretty cool.

Switching gears, Smokey Bones, a 68-unit bar-and-grill franchise concentrated in Florida and the Eastern Seaboard, did something similar in an effort to rebrand itself for a younger audience. Using a combination of local marketing, Web development, personalization, and social media, the chain recruited one staff member per location to become a Web host. Each went through social media training to complement their already Web-savvy aptitude. These employees essentially became the voice of each particular location ...