Oh gosh darn, I suck. I meant to mention Wabash & Lake's upcoming seminar on "Creating Customer Evangelists" in SherpaWeekly this week. Then I completely forgot. It's an event that I wish I could attend myself (I'll be moving house that day or I would), it's that, well I'm moving house now and seems like everything is misplaced, half-forgotten and/or crazy.



Here's the thing, everybody I interview in the B2B world (especially agencies and consultancies of all sizes) tells me that half or more of their sales come through referrals. You could say referrals are 100% responsible for many people's profit margins. Hardly anyone focuses on referral marketing aside from the odd "send this email to a friend" viral-thingy. We just assume referrals will take care of themselves.



As a marketer, there's one rule I've learned: that every kind of marketing has rules. Marketing is absolutely more of a science than an art. It makes sense that the science of getting referrals, or customer evangelism as Wabash & Lake call it, would be a mission critical thing for us all to learn more about. In fact, probably far more important to the bottom line than most other stuff marketers spend a lot of time on. Rant over. If you are anywhere near Chicago (or can get there) see if you can go to this day-long workshop.