A Publicly Traded Company Shares How They Produce Epic Customer Appreciation Events

Eric Eden :
0:59

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Kurt Tuford. He is a VP of sales. We don't often have VP of sales on a marketing show, but this is a special one. Kurt's got a great story for us today. Welcome to the show, hey, eric. Welcome.

Curt Tueffert:
1:15

Thank you so much for giving me a chance to be on our show. For the listeners as well as the viewers, this is going to be a great episode.

Eric Eden :
1:23

All right, let's jump right in. Why don't you give people just a minute or two about who you are and what you do before we jump into the story, so they have some context? Sure, kurt Tuford.

Curt Tueffert:
1:35

VP of sales development for DXP. We're a large Houston-based industrial distributor celebrating its 116th year in business. Part of what I do is I bring customers and prospects together through a marketing campaign. Many different things I've done over 20 years here at DXP. One particularly has been highly successful, eric. That's the one you and I are going to talk about today.

Eric Eden :
2:02

Let's jump right in. I think it has to do with customer appreciation, something that more people should probably do. Let's hear about it, you bet.

Curt Tueffert:
2:10

This started a while ago. I'll give you the big story. We were driving down to another customer appreciation event in one of our smaller branches. They had 350 people for a crawfish boil and live music in Beaumont, texas. As we left the event and drove back to Houston, which is approximately two hours away, our vice president of marketing said hey, kurt, can you do any better than they did? That challenge brought me to a heightened awareness of how I was going to blow the doors out of this. I gathered all my resources and we created what we would call the customer appreciation day here in Houston, texas.

Curt Tueffert:
2:53

I decided I could leverage our vendors and ask the vendors to contribute financially if I could bring a large group of people together. We knew this was going to be such a huge venture that we had to go and find the biggest building we could possibly rent here in the Houston Texas area. We had a dog park or a race park, if you will. They had a building, big green roofed building. We began to solicit the vendors. From the vendors I began to solicit a live band and giveaway prizes. Then came the marketing. We started asking our sales pros to give us the email addresses and the mailing addresses of the people who would like to come to our event. It started slow 50, 100, 300, 800, 1500. As we got closer to the event, I started panic because where was I going to get the crawfish and the beer for this event? We had the vendors. We had plenty of the rappel prizes. We just continued to use this as a way to hype the market up.

Curt Tueffert:
4:00

From there, the sales people got their customers as well as prospects, and they would register online so we would get some kind of an idea about how many people would be attending this event and, of course, each person who registered. We would then send back an email confirmation Thank you for registering, we look forward to having you at the event. And that would capture their email address and their contact information so that we could, provision-based, ask them if we could continue to solicit to them. When they arrived at the event, they got a map treasure map and they had to go to eight of the booths any eight they wanted to and they had to listen to the presentation and get that person to sign or stamp off on their treasure map. That treasure map would then be given to us for rappel prizes and we would go through the process of pulling the raffle prize and reading it out to the person, but they had to complete the treasure map in order to qualify. So everyone was motivationally engaged in the process.

Curt Tueffert:
5:04

That started years ago and we started to escalate where in the Greater Houston area, we had a large location in the north and we had a large location in the south, so every year we would alternate north to the south. At present time, as we're recording this, our customer appreciation will be next week. It'll be on the south side. Every year we would create themes. One of the last themes I did, because it was on the south side of Houston, was much more about.

Curt Tueffert:
5:34

It was very much of a manly kind of event. We gave away guns, we had mechanical bull riding, we had three walking magicians and I even contracted out some of the Texans cheerleaders to kick this event off. All of this to say, the more people customers and prospects I could bring into an event where they could learn about our company and engage with us, the higher the probability that we could appreciate the customers who purchased from us and we could bring in, through this hysteria, if you will, prospects who come in and go. What is going on? I need to be a part of this. So that has been the P customer appreciation day here in Houston.

Eric Eden :
6:21

Guns, beer, cheerleaders and bull riding. That's amazing. I don't think I've ever heard of such an amazing customer appreciation event and I think more customers want to be appreciated and your company is a publicly traded company, very successful, and I assume this is one of the reasons why is because customers feel appreciated right.

Curt Tueffert:
6:44

A lot of it has to do with the ability to appreciate our customers, because as an industrial distributor, we sell other people's products. So in order for us to get the blue that retains, it has to be the loyalty, maybe it's the prices, maybe it's our technical expertise. And then we try to move these customer appreciation events out beyond corporate, which is in the epicenter here in Houston, texas, other areas. But you're absolutely right, in each year there's a different theme. It may be a go to the outdoors theme, and so we're giving away deer hunts and fishing journeys, or it might be we're in the Mardi Gras kind of area now, so it might be getting a trip to New Orleans or something of that nature.

Curt Tueffert:
7:29

Yeah, when I did the whole crazy thing with guns, I had to make sure that in the great state of Texas and the Pasadena area, that they would allow us to raffle off these products and it was a food. There was a lot of people there and what could go wrong? Crayfish, beer, guns, cheerleaders and raffle prizes. And each of the vendors would donate raffle prizes. And here's the thing, eric, for Europe, for the people who are thinking of doing this, I think I oversold it because I had 40 vendors and the 40 vendors were all contributing multiple raffle prizes In addition to the raffle prizes we were giving away. So the raffle prize table became four, four eight-foot tables piled with all of the raffle gear. So each time somebody would get their treasure map punched they'd see all of this product man, I need to stay around. So they would stay at five o'clock when the doors opened. They would stay all the way through eight o'clock because they had to be present to get the biggest prizes, which is the gun deer hunt, the fishing journey, and it was beautiful because what a retention way. People stayed because they really wanted to win.

Curt Tueffert:
8:45

It wasn't one of those things where to prize mails, We'd escalate all evening. Here's the problem I had I had too many raffle prizes to the amount of time left in the event. So about seven o'clock in the evening I'm looking at that eight-foot table which turned out to be three and four eight-foot tables. We still had raffle prizes. So we started cutting into the live band and said guys, every 18 minutes we need to make an announcement. And I started bundling so you could get the cooler and the ice chest and the drill bits and whatever. We bundled these things together and it was hysterical because the customers would realize we've got an opportunity to get some good stuff, and why not?

Eric Eden :
9:33

There's a couple of amazing things about this that occurred to me. One is that an industrial products company. If you invited me to an event for an industrial products company, I might think that would be boring, and I think you checked the box of not making it boring all the things that you've suggested. And the second thing is the other genius of it seems to be mixing together, at these events, current customers and prospective customers, right, because hopefully the current customers would meet and talk to some of the existing customers and do some of the selling for you, right.

Curt Tueffert:
10:11

It happens a lot there, eric. There's a lot of the ability to have these people work together, sit together at tables. If you're a sales professional and you're trying to bring people together for the connection, you could purposely grab your prospect and introduce them to someone who is a customer. Or they could be sitting at a table when the magician comes by and does this remarkable sleight of hand. Or you could take the kids if they brought family to the person doing the caricature and then they could draw that picture. And again, it's an event. It's a non-selling event, of course. The vendors who are funding this crazy venture. They're actually selling, so they're out there showing their products to up to 13 to 1500 prospects.

Eric Eden :
11:00

The other thing that really warms my heart about this story is you, as a sales leader, accepting the challenge from your VP of marketing and really building up this event and making it something so great. The teamwork involved there is probably part of what makes your company so successful the sales and marketing leaders working together to do great things like this.

Curt Tueffert:
11:22

I can't say enough about our marketing team. They're always understaffed and so they're always overworked and do what they do with a smile on their face and a song in their heart all the time. You never see them stressing out, even though they are. I've seen them this week very stressed out because the event is happening next week. There's so many moving parts. But we've really worked well together because we communicate. Sales communicates to marketing, marketing communicates to sales. In fact, marketing is smart enough to realize they're so understaffed they recruit the local Houston sales teams to help with the event and no one says no to this. They love it. But it doesn't always start that way right. You know as well as I do. Sometimes the marketing and sales relationship is adversarial. It's very much in conflict and we try to work together through the conflict so that we don't throw them under the bus. They don't throw us under the bus. We try to work together in order to find out where we can become very synergistic Amazing.

Eric Eden :
12:30

I encourage everyone listening to share this story with your friends to learn about the best in class customer appreciation. It's a great example. It builds customer loyalty. Thank you so much, kurt, for sharing this story. We appreciate it. I will link to Kurt's information in the show notes so anyone who wants to reach out to him on LinkedIn can get more insights about this, if you like. Again, kurt, thanks so much for being with us today.

Curt Tueffert:
13:01

We appreciate it, eric, thank you very much for hosting such a phenomenal podcast.