Everybody has customers in each of the categories above. Start at the right with me:

Evangelists are your very best customers. These people are your greatest supporters. They buy much of what you put in front of them. They are communicators, telling people they know about your products and services. Evangelists are your defenders. They are forgiving of mistakes, assuming your intentions are always in their best interests. Evangelists make our lives very easy. We want as many evangelists as we can get, but most of us have just a few.

Very Satisfied Customers are your pre-evangelists. They are in prime position to be converted (pun intended) to Evangelists. If you have five Evangelist customers, you probably have 10 to 12 Very Satisfied ones. These first two groups are a small percentage of your total customers, but they make up the majority of your revenue.

Your Total Customer Base is everybody else who has purchased from you, and your ProspectiveCustomers are people who are not yet customers, but should be.

The key lessons here:

• You should know precisely which of your customers fall into each category, because you can talk and market to them differently. So, categorize your customers carefully into each grouping.
• Our job is to pull people through these categories, from left to right. Evangelist conversion is the goal.
• How do you move people from one grouping to the next? Good marketing. Constantly and steadily demonstrating your value. Carefully targeting testimonials and case studies from customers on the right to customer on the left.

Allow people on the left the opportunity to imagine what it would be like to be on the right, by communicating the experiences of the customers on the right.

This piece ran in my Evangelist Marketing Minute short-form newsletter, which you can receive every Monday morning for free by signing up here.