I often emphasize the need to find evangelists for your company. While the concept is gaining traction, it still doesn’t get nearly enough attention. This is a huge missed opportunity. Throughout my career, I’ve seen firsthand the incredible impact of evangelists. Simply put, there’s almost no other marketing activity that can deliver such immediate and significant results. In this post, I am going to share two examples of the power of evangelists. The first case is from when I led marketing for Pentagon Federal Credit Union. PenFed was the second largest federal credit union, but compared to the big banks it was a relatively small player and my marketing budget was a rounding error compared to the budgets of the big FIs. While we may not have had big budgets, we did have exceptional products with the lowest mortgage rates, highest savings account rates and the richest credit card rewards. Our cards were so good they attracted the attention of Curtis Arnold founder of cardratings.com. While there were credit card comparison sites whose primary focus was to generate affiliate revenue, cardratings.com was not one of them. Curtis’s mission was to find the best credit cards for his users. Because we had a great product and treated our members well, PenFed was a good match with Curtis’s mission. The power of evangelism was really demonstrated in earned media. Financial reporters trusted Curtis and he was often their source when they wanted to write an article on the best credit cards. PenFed was at the top of his list. This led to coverage in the NY Times, USA Today, Money Magazine, Forbes, Fortune, Kiplinger’s, the WSJ, The Today Show, and more—worth millions in exposure and thousands of new cardholders. No other marketing tactic could have matched Curtis’s impact. Can this work in B2B? Absolutely. My second example is more recent and comes from Mark Kosoglow. He recently wrote a post about trying to find a good CRM for his business. In the post he described his selection process and why he eventually chose NetHunt CRM. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mkosoglow_when-i-resigned-as-cro-at-catalyst-i-got-activity-7212432051625492481-hSEk Two weeks later he posted an update, NetHunt shared that they had received over 200 signups from Mark’s post. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mkosoglow_if-i-mention-a-product-in-a-post-a-couple-activity-7219728726773673984-QN_O Once again, there is almost no marketing activity NetHunt could have implemented that would have that big impact so quickly. Curtis and Mark probably do not think of themselves as evangelists, but they meet the three requirements of a great evangelist. The 3 Traits of a Great Evangelist - A person who believes in the product - A person who has authority and is trusted - A person who has an audience Great evangelists can have a significant impact on growth, has your company found yours?