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

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How Employees Help Flip the Funnel

Without customers, you have no business. That’s a central premise of this book. It might sound so elementary, yet it’s profound; especially when contrasted against the fact that we blindly continue to chase strangers with an unhealthy emphasis on acquisition. Here’s another no-brainer for you: Take employees out the equation, and there is no equation. If you want to be in the customer-experience game, it helps to have talented, empowered, and engaging employees to represent the brand—and serve as the face, heart, and soul of the company behind the brand.

As guilty as we are of taking our customers for granted, so, too, are we guilty of taking (advantage of) our employees for granted. The churn that plagues our businesses from the outside-in poses an equally massive challenge from the inside out. And although most companies struggle to come to grips with this connection point—namely, the bridge between internal and external customers—there are those exceptions to the norm: companies who do treat their employees like gold. And more often than not, this translates into a superior customer experience and is evident in bottom-line performance and results.

Take a company like Costco, where a customer once described²⁸ shopping as a “religious experience.” It’s an appropriate term, given the cultural obsession the company has with taking care of one another. It’s no coincidence that Costco has the lowest employee turnover rate in retailing—five ...