1. The most important thing you can do to accelerate growth is to change the people you hang out with. That’s true for individuals as well as organizations. Every parent knows that if teenagers hang out with sketchy people, it stunts their growth. Hanging out with winners propels their growth. Same for aspiring athletes. And ambitious professionals. Hang out with eagles and you’ll soar. Hang out with turkeys and you’ll start to gobble! And that’s equally true for the growth of a business (which is, after all, an organization of individuals).

2. The most important people your business can hang out with are your customers. Not your employees. Not your board. Not your investors. Not your advisors. Not analysts. Not the media. All of these are important—but none are as important to hang out (spend quality time) with as your customers. Especially, the right customers. Hanging out with the eagles in your market will make all those other groups look 5-10x smarter. Apple, for example, has always targeted the most imaginative and innovative customers in its markets—designers, artists and other creatives—who helped shape the firm’s legendary innovations, and who continue to pay premium prices for Apple’s products.

3. Pursue the eagles in your market, aka “Super AIC customers.” “AIC” customers are those that provide Advocacy, Influence, and/or Contributions (in the form of knowledge, resources and/or time) to your business. In 2005, a team led by former McKinsey consultant David G. Thompson analyzed those companies with the most impressive growth over a 25-year period: those that had an IPO between 1980 and 2005 and had achieved revenues of at least $1B. The major factor distinguishing the billion-dollar firms was that they placed the highest priority on winning Super AIC customers—the eagles in their markets. For example, starting in 1980, Super AIC customer IBM transformed little Microsoft into an operating system provider, and then launched the firm on its rapid ascent to a multi-billion-dollar firm. Super AIC customer Solomon Brothers accelerated Cisco’s successful entry into is first major market, financial services. EBay’s “power sellers” were key to that firm’s hyper growth.

4. Get crystal clear on what “Super AIC customers” and “hang out” mean. Your biggest revenue producer isn’t necessarily a Super AIC—it might be an uninnovative, also-ran firm. Neither is a famous brand; it might be regarded as irrelevant or a dinosaur by buyers in your market. A true Super AIC customer is, 1) Influential in your target market; 2) Innovative, and thus able to energize your innovation, and 3) Visionary—that is, can clearly describe the future state it’s working toward. “Hanging out” with a customer like this means you’re spending enough time with them to co-create a shared vision, what social constructionism, a branch of the social sciences, calls a “shared understanding” of the world. Do this through advisory boards, branded industry groups, customer communities, user groups and the like.
   Research¹ is fleshing out the specific ways that Super AIC customers accelerate growth for the companies they do business with. For example:

5. Marketing and Sales no longer influence and sell. Your customers do. In today’s world, your sales and marketing units are (vital) conduits and enablers for getting customers to influence and sell to other customers—especially Super AIC customers. Techniques for persuasion are no longer their most important talents—the ability to extract and tell customers’ stories is. When Adobe mapped out its strategy for offering cloud-based services, it asked three critical questions: who are the Super AIC customers we need to win? What stories do we want them to tell? And how do we help them tell their stories?

6. Your best source for robust innovation is innovative customers. The best way to make your designers or developers look like geniuses is to engage them with innovative Super AIC customers. When data storage provider Rackspace found its business model seriously threatened by giants like Amazon Web Services and Google, it had to make dramatic changes to its business model. So it went from providing commoditized storage services to a well differentiated model of total cloud management—by doing things like expanding its engineering support; expanding its platform support beyond Linux to include Windows deployment; expanding its applications support, and eventually supporting other leading platforms—including Amazon! What drove those changes? Hiring brilliant product developers and strategists? No. It was innovative Super AIC customers like Southwest Airlines and Fidelity—regularly requesting such service and support enhancements—that pulled Rackspace into its future.

7. To improve your customers’ experience (CX), your best resource is other customers. There is a long, often overlooked history of Super AIC customers driving major improvements in customer experience—along with improvements to the business (including improving margins). For example, when Microsoft’s business model was seriously threatened by “freeware”–“How are we supposed to compete with free?” was an often-asked question at the firm–the firm’s customer community, led by “MVP’s” (Microsoft’s version of Super AIC customers), stepped in. They provided free support, dramatically improving customer support while eventually saving the firm hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s how Microsoft competed with free. Amazon Sales Navigator is using selected customer advocates to prevent nervous new customers from defecting when they get discouraged or lost using a new solution. This includes creating customer success stories intended for new customers.

¹Advanced Practices in Customer Advocacy and Engagement, Center for Customer Engagement, 2017