How Superfan Customers Sell For You
With Guest Brittany Hodak
Average businesses chase customers. Good companies focus on retention. But, it's the super companies that focus on delighting customers so they become lifelong advocates.
The How to Sell More Podcast
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February 12, 2025
What if you could turn your customers into an army of unpaid advocates? People who eagerly share testimonials, send referrals and champion your brand to their friends and colleagues.
Teams often obsess over customer acquisition because it's what's tracked. In a world of MQLs and CACs, it's easy to overlook the elusive yet powerful ROI of customer experience. In our attribution-driven business culture, delighting customers is often seen as an expense rather than an investment.
In this landmark 100th episode of How to Sell More, we explore the power of turning your customers into lifelong superfans with Brittany Hodak, customer experience expert and author of Creating Superfans: How To Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates.
The big takeaway? Brittany believes that customer advocacy is the lowest-cost way to acquire new customers, and she shares how businesses can craft every single aspect of the customer experience to exceed expectations.
“Customer experience is not an expense. It’s the single biggest opportunity you have to create an army of unpaid advocates that are out there creating more customers for you.” - Brittany Hodak
The truth is that customer experience isn't just part of your business — it is your business. From marketing to billing to support, every touchpoint matters. Customers can't tell the difference between something that's a good product or service versus a great one, but they absolutely notice when you're giving them 50% versus 100% of your attention.
Brittany is a master of the customer experience. She built a multi-million-dollar company that produced fan engagement campaigns for some of the biggest names in entertainment, including Katy Perry, Dolly Parton, and Luke Bryan. You may also remember her from Shark Tank, where she made headlines when four sharks fought to invest in her company.
Today, Brittany brings her unique blend of standup-worthy humour and research-backed insights to stages around the world.
Tired of chasing customers? This episode will teach you how to turn your customers into your most powerful marketing tool by giving them an experience worth talking about.
Connect with Brittany Hodak
More About Today's Guest, Brittany Hodak
Brittany Hodak is a keynote speaker and entrepreneur who helps businesses create devoted customers using her "Superfan" approach. Her book Creating Superfans was praised by Forbes as essential reading for anyone with customers, showing companies how to turn one-time buyers into lifelong advocates.
As co-founder of The Superfan Company, she built the business to over $10 million in revenue, creating fan experiences for brands like Walmart, Disney, Katy Perry, and Dolly Parton. In 2015, she appeared on Shark Tank, where four investors competed to invest in her company at a $4 million valuation. She later became Chief Experience Officer at Experience.com, where she shaped customer experience strategies for major enterprises.
She's been named to Billboard's 30 Under 30, Inc.'s 30 Under 30, and Advertising Age's 40 Under 40 lists. She holds a Guinness World Record and received the United Nations' "Most Disruptive Marketing Entrepreneur" award. With over 350 published articles and regular appearances on ABC, CBS, and CNBC, she combines her marketing expertise (M.S. in Marketing, CUNY Baruch) with practical experience that started when she worked as a radio station mascot.
Speaking to clients like American Express and the UN, she mixes humour with practical frameworks that show businesses how to create passionate fans. Her message is simple: "The experience you deliver isn't just part of your business—it is your business."
Mark Drager: Brittany, in your book Creating Superfans you write: “We’re living in an experience economy. The experience your customers have with your brand or business is the most important competitive advantage you have at your disposal. When you get it right, it’s the hardest thing for competitors to copy.”
As a brand strategist, this leaped off the page because so much of my work is about tapping into this competitive advantage, articulating it, sharing its essence through marketing…
And yet, despite knowing the importance of customer experience, many companies still focus primarily on acquisition. Why do you think that disconnect exists?
Brittany Hodak: Well, I think it's for a few reasons. I think one is that many entrepreneurs come from sales backgrounds where they are very actively incentivized to think about the new because all they're doing is acquisition, and then they hand it off to somebody else, and sometimes there's not that mindset shift of as an entrepreneur, you are now responsible for the entirety of the picture.
I mean, in a perfect world, every salesperson is thinking that too, regardless of their role in an organization. But as an entrepreneur, you must know that it is not just the acquisition, it's the retention, it's the advocacy, it's all of it.
I think the other thing, honestly, Mark, is that a lot of entrepreneurs suffer from shiny object syndrome, and it's exciting to chase the new we want to go out. We want to do the thing. It's that thrill of the chase. And we're like, I got him. And so many of us get that, like, a dopamine hit, and then we sort of just, like, hand it off to somebody else.
But the reality is, if you can delight your customers, if you can put the attention and the intentionality into making every step of the journey fantastic, doing a great job exceeding their expectations, you will have so many new customers that are coming to you because they were referred that advocacy is the most powerful tool. It is by far the lowest cost way to acquire new customers and to get the highest value customers right?
Like when you look at it, how likely am I to convert this and how much is this customer more likely to spend with me? That is 100% where the attention needs to be, how am I being so good that my current customers are creating more customers for me?
Mark Drager: …So good that my current customers are creating more customers for me?
Brittany Hodak: And you know, listener, especially if you're an entrepreneur or somebody who's building a business, here's something that I would say, and this is not in the books, and this is this sort of just something that I've been thinking about lately and creating some content around lately.
And I believe that there are only four ways we get customers. We buy customers, right? We pay for leads, whether that's, you know, social, whether that's ABM, like, what you're doing, you're paying for somebody to know that you exist. Number two, you earn customers because of your reputation.
So somebody reads your reviews. They see something about you online, maybe they, you know, read something about you in a local trade show, like a mix of paid and earned. In that bucket, right that we call the reputation.
Number three is repeat business, the people who have worked with you before and continue to work with you. So that retention piece, and then the fourth bucket is referrals.
And something that I believe very strongly is that average businesses chase customers, right? They're thinking about acquisition above average, or good companies focus on that retention piece, right? Like, how do I keep the customers that I have? So they're thinking about the acquisition and the retention, but it's the super companies that focus on delight, that look at that advocacy piece to say, we want the majority of our customers that we get to be coming in that fourth and final bucket of referrals, right?
We don't want to be paying for our growth. We want to be earning our growth. We want our existing customers to be so happy that they are telling their friends, so that when somebody changes jobs to go somewhere else, they say, Hey, we've got somebody in mind that you've got to work with.
Or when somebody is in the position to recommend you, they do. And that is a difference between the companies that will grow a little bit and the companies that will grow exponentially. If you can not just worry about acquisition or retention, but if you can set that bar at delight, how can I be so good that nobody would ever think of leaving?
We go from being seen as a commodity provider to a category of one, and then we're also creating all of these very well-qualified warm inbound, not even leads, but like people that are ready to buy. Because they've been told how great we are. That is how you exponentially grow your business. That is how you leverage the power of super fans to set yourself apart. And win on experience.
Mark Drager: Speaking of experience… what’s the difference between customer experience and customer service?
Brittany Hodak: I love this question. So customer service is a department. It is a single function. And typically, customer service is reactive. Somebody is reaching out because they need problems or they have a problem, and they need support.
Customer Experience is the totality of all of the touch points that a customer has. So everybody in every department, whether you're in marketing or it or finance, you are all on the experience team, and every single person at a company is what I like to call the Acting Chief of experience, at some point, you are the one in the driver's seat.
You are the one that a customer is going to have a conversation with, or a prospect is going to bounce something off of, and they are going to base their opinion on the entire organization, on how that conversation with you went, like you are the one representing the entire organization.
So customer experience is an ethos. It is a responsibility that is shared by every single employee and contractor partner, like anybody who's operating on behalf of your company.
Mark Drager: Some businesses, especially those with strong market positions, view exceptional customer experience as an unnecessary expense.
I’m in the middle of this right now with our bank. Because, when my son was 14, he opened an account for his paper route.
And despite the bank saying that students don’t pay fees, they charged him monthly fees, which put his account in overdraft, which racked up a bunch of charges. And even though they should just type-type to return the charges, they’re refusing to give him his money back.
So, I don't know if it has to do with the size of the company or the industry, but there seems to be a considered effort to ignore customer experience, build a protective moat, lock people into products and services.
And if that's the case, then great customer experience is an expense.
My bank obviously doesn’t see the issue with my son as harming, a literal life-long relationship, but rather an expense of giving back a few hundred dollars in service fees.
So it can feel like it's an expense that doesn't have to be invested in, because what's the alternative?
Brittany Hodak: Well, I would say that it's not an expense. It's the single biggest opportunity you have to create an army of unpaid advocates that are out there creating more customers for you.
And if you think about the way you buy, as a consumer when you are making a purchase decision, you know, forget about the monopolistic as you said, you know, like monopolies always fall like that is, you know, telecom is a good example of people that are thinking of it as highly commoditized, but the world that we're living in is accelerating at a pace that is making it harder for people to have those monopolies.
There are upstarts challenging in pretty much every vertical across the board, the people that have said, I can be terrible and get away with it, because who's going to come after me and challenge me, both from a regulatory and also just a competitive standpoint, there are more competitors coming to those people.
So like that aside, just for many of us, because many of us exist in environments where there are challengers and there are people that are going to be able to make a play for our customers.
Think about it as a customer, how you make a decision when you're trying to decide which new way you're going to go, right?
You're evaluating the opportunities you're gonna ask existing customers say whether that's going online and making a post, whether that's a text group to a friend or WhatsApp or, you know, just picking up the phone and calling somebody. You're gonna say, what does it feel like to do business with them?
People that are not investing in customer experience are creating an environment where many or perhaps even most of your current customers are gonna say it's not that great.
Or if you make it hard for people to leave, if you're building those moats, if you're creating artificial resistance to try to get people to stay longer, you're going to make them hate you.
And so now you have this army of detractors out there who are not saying to you, hey, you suck. They're doing something 100 times worse, and that's saying to other people, hey, they suck. And the reason that's so much worse is because you're not a part of that conversation and you have no ability to defend yourself. It's just people out there saying, work with anyone but them, and that is why you must invest in customer experience.
It is so critical, not just for your perspective and your current customers, but also so that your former customers will say, when asked or given the opportunity, yeah, like it was fine, I'm doing something else now, but they were really great, or I outgrew them, but between X and Y, they were the perfect choice. Or, you know, it wasn't a good fit for me, but it might be a great fit for you, because of XYZ.
Mark Drager: You've developed something called the SUPER model to help businesses create remarkable customer experiences systematically. Can you walk us through that framework?
Brittany Hodak: Well, I'm glad you asked Mark, in my book, Creating Superfans, I make an impassioned case for something that I call the Supermodel, which is a formula that I put together to take customer experience, but to also place it like in a broader ecosystem, right?
Because it's truly, as I said before, not just a department, not just a partial responsibility of a few people. The test is set alongside your sales and your marketing and your ops and your onboarding and your service and support and your legal and finance and everybody has to be involved in this.
So I outline something that I call the super model. Now, S-U-P-E-R is an acronym, and it starts with your story, which is essentially, why do you deserve super fans? What is it that you're doing that makes you the right choice and your competitors the wrong choice for your ideal customers?
Because if you can't answer that, they're certainly never gonna be able to figure it out, right? So let's start with your story. Understand your customer story. What are they struggling with? What's the transformation they're looking for?
What is it that they're hoping to have happen so that you can understand if you are truly the right person to help them? Because I always say that super fans are created at the intersection of your story and every customer story that overlap is where you truly can go from being seen as like somebody that can help them to the right person to solve this very specific problem that they have.
P stands for personalized. That's where I talk about the way that you can use all the high-tech and high-touch ways to create the highest level of impact, to overpower that apathy that customers may be feeling or prospects may be feeling.
E stands for exceed expectations. That's the most like nuts and bolts experiential stuff, like when we talk about customer experience, that's where I talk about journey mapping. That's where I talk about what I call intentional experience design, of bringing more intentionality to all the things that happen at all the different moments.
And then finally, R stands for repeat. That's where I talk about the systems and the processes that are necessary to truly build the infrastructure that makes this all repeatable, because the cold, hard truth is you can't just like, be great sometimes.
You have to figure out a way to make it scalable and make it sustainable so that it doesn't matter who on your team somebody encounters when they encounter them, there is a consistently, predictably amazing experience, because we've all been in a scenario where you, like, go eat somewhere and it's awesome, and it's awesome, and then you go back and get the same thing a week later, and it sucks, and you're like, Huh? And there's just so much cognitive dissonance in your brain that maybe you'll go back, but, like, probably not, right?
Unless you are really lacking of choices, because it's easier to just roll the dice and go somewhere else than to try to wrestle with which one of those experiences was the exception and which one was the rule.
Mark Drager: The country star Granger Smith offers a powerful example of super fandom. Can you share that story and what it teaches us about customer experience?
Brittany Hodak: Yeah, so Granger is a country music artist, and he and I were on a tour together, and he was talking about what a crazy feeling it was to him when his fans first started getting tattoos of his name, of his logo, of his face. He has this alternative, like Alter Ego character called Earl Dibbles Jr. And people were getting the tattoos. And he said the first time somebody was like, hey, check out this tattoo.
And then the next time somebody was like, Here, sign my arm here with a sharpie but sign it really good because I'm gonna go to the tattoo studio, and tattoo over it.
He got everybody on his team together and was like, Yo, anytime like everybody on his team already knew that customer experience was important.
They had to treat fans really well.
But he was like, when you see somebody with a tattoo, immediately they're like, everything VIP, whether we're giving them merch, whether they're we're inviting them backstage, whether we're upgrading their tickets, everyone has to super serve that person, because he said, I could not even imagine getting a tattoo on my body and going to a show or any experience with that person and having a bad experience.
Because Can you imagine? Like going somewhere and being treated poorly by somebody who is seven steps away, right? So maybe it's the bartender, maybe it's the merch guy, maybe it's the security guard, but having somebody do something that reflects poorly on that artist whose tattoo you have on your body, and I thought it was a really great reminder of when you are fortunate enough to be in a position where you have a customer who really likes you, who has been loyal to you, who enjoys your brand.
It's not like, oh, we can let our foot off the pedal of trying because they love us and everything's going to be good. It's the stakes are now that much higher because their expectations have gone up and they have the ability to now become like a super advocate or a super adversary, right that we want to make sure that we're doing a really great job of taking care of them.
Mark Drager: When businesses try to map out their customer journey, they often start with that first touchpoint - maybe it's marketing, word of mouth. However customers discover them. Then, they follow it through the next steps: lead generation, sales process, onboarding, delivery.
But I notice many businesses stop tracking at different points - some when the lead comes in, others when the sale closes, or maybe when the product is delivered. They focus on their particular segment without seeing the whole picture.
If a business owner were to truly audit their company's entire customer experience - every touchpoint, every department handoff, every interaction - it can feel overwhelming.
You've got marketing, sales, operations, support, and countless moments where something could go right or wrong. How do you wholistically improve customer experience, while keeping things manageable?
Brittany Hodak: Well, a way to make it seem less overwhelming is to let different departments own different parts of that journey, to say to them, Hey, if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about your interaction with a customer. What would it be? Talk to your customers, find out.
You're so right Mark that so many people stop either pre-purchase or app purchase. But for many people, the experience that they have with your brand just starts when you stop thinking about it, right? So if you've sold them something, how are they interacting with it?
How are they using it? Whether it's a software product that they're using or something that's in their home, this is why, like, packaging is so important, delivery and logistics are so important.
What are the touch points that you can do? What are the follow-up moments that if you are fortunate enough to sell something to somebody that they're gonna have in their home that's going to be a part of their life? How are you helping them get the most out of that? How are you coming alongside of them and supporting them, whether that's with recommendations or information?
So a good way to do it and not make it overwhelming, is to just look at individual moments and say, How can we elevate this? Because for many companies, the majority of the touchpoints are what I would call neutral. So it's like, very broadly speaking, you're gonna leave every interaction feeling one of three ways better or worse or the same as you did before.
And the overwhelming majority of the interactions that all of us have every day are neutral. They're very transactional.
So if you can take one at every step of the journey and say, How do I transform this from being very transactional to feeling a little more experiential? How can I surprise and delight? How can I go above and beyond?
How can I do something that's gonna feel really special but is also easy to replicate so that we can do it again and again and again, because that's how you truly want to scale with customer experience.
It's very hard to say we're gonna, you know, spend X number of hours or X number of dollars or time, whatever the resource is, on an individual customer, unless you're selling very high value or high dollar items. So what instead you can do is say, Where is there an opportunity to infuse some surprise and delight, to build a system that we can replicate again and again and again, and look at that across a few different points of the journey.
Now, I am not a proponent of traditional customer journey mapping, because what can oftentimes happen is you end up with something that looks like it's like a Boeing flight manual, right? Appears 19,000 cells on a spreadsheet and 400 different sentiment analyses and 86 different considerations, and then, like nobody ever looks at it ever. You should have something that's on a few pieces of paper that says, Here are some important touch points that we're not maximizing right now to the extent that we can what is something that we can do, pre-delivery, post-delivery, while things are happening? What can we elevate to make feel special?
Mark Drager: You know, I had an important realization running my agency. We're in a subjective business, and while we have KPIs, metrics, and concrete goals, at the end of the day it comes down to trust and relationships.
My team and I are practitioners - we obsess over quality, outcomes, and technical excellence. But I discovered something surprising: clients aren't comparing our work against some objective standard and saying 'this is 8% better.'
What I realized is that while we were intensely focused on delivering the absolute best work possible, we were sometimes missing something more fundamental: how clients felt about the process.
The quality of our work matters, but not nearly as much as how clients feel about the work and their experience with us. It was an aha moment - we were so driven to deliver technical excellence that we sometimes overlooked the emotional journey.
This creates an interesting tension: how do you balance the drive for perfection with the need to maintain strong client relationships? What's your perspective on managing this dynamic?
Brittany Hodak: Here's the thing, a client doesn't know the difference between 98% of your best and 100% of your best, but they damn sure can tell the difference between feeling like you gave them 20% of your attention versus 50% of your attention.
The extra touch with the emails, like you may be thinking, Oh, I'm letting this go unanswered a little longer, or I'm not touching in about or touching on this thing, or checking in about this thing, because I'm doing all this other work and it's gonna be worth it to them. In the end, they don't see that.
They only know and feel what they can see and what they experience, and then they extrapolate that everything else must be like that part that they're experiencing. Right? It's like the analogy of the duck, like above the water and below the water, like the clients see above the water, that is what they see.
Mark Drager: In his book, Delivering Happiness, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh said, “You can’t outsource a core competency.” And he reached that conclusion because, while Zappos is famous for providing extraordinary customer experiences, when they were originally scaling they outsourced their logistics and shipping to a 3rd party who couldn’t live up to the service levels and expectations Zappos promised customers.
And after all this time and money setting up the 3rd party, they finally said, “No if we're going to deliver this level of customer service, we have to bring this in-house.”
And so I'm thinking about our partners, vendors, and suppliers, the parts of our businesses that we have to outsource. That we have less control over. Does it come down to assessing our values and then working our butts off to try and partners to meet that?
Brittany Hodak: This is such a great question Mark, and something that so many entrepreneurs wrestle with every day. One is exactly as you said, making sure that to the extent that you can control it, it's a really great culture fit, right?
It's somebody who shares your values, who understands what you think is the most important.
And sometimes that means paying more, sometimes that means waiting longer. But the smartest companies know that is a cost that it is worth it, right? Like that is the opportunity cost of not doing that far exceeds the hard cost of doing it.
The second part is getting really clear on what it looks like to give somebody the level of service that you demand in your business. Because oftentimes we enter into contracts with vendors and we're like, oh yeah, it'll be fine, whatever the terms are.
We're very vague. A lot of times it's because the entrepreneur or the business didn't have the specificity to say, these are exactly the way in which we need these things to happen. When somebody calls in and says X, you will say, Y.
So a lot of times, these sort of service level gaps aren't because you are working with a terrible partner or they had any malicious intent. It's because they thought they were doing the right thing, because you didn't explicitly say, this is what it needs to look like.
This is who we are. And I think one of the great things that Tony talks about in that book is like they had to document all of that. They had say, This is who we are. This is why it matters. This is how things will be handled.
And then once you do that, it's sort of like paradoxical. The more that you put into saying this is who we are and why, the more freedom you think of people to interpret that. Because then it's about hiring great people and saying, do what you interpret this to mean. Versus in an absence of that, you have to sort of dictate, like, 1000 little things, right? Like I have to show you every single tree. Because I never said, hey, just go look for the forest.
Mark Drager: I've been speaking with Brittany Hodak, who is the author of Creating Super Fans: How To Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates. I like to end each podcast with this question, so I'm going to hit you with it. What would be your number one tip, recommendation, suggestion to help those of us listening to sell more?
Brittany Hodak: My number one suggestion would be to pick up the phone call your best customers and have an honest conversation about them. Say, what is it that you love working about us? What is it that you would change if you could wave a magic wand to make one thing feel easier?
What would you say to a friend or colleague about us if they said, Hey, what's it like to work with them, and then what would you say? If that friend or colleague said, Is there any one thing that you wish that they would change to be even better?
Have those conversations, because I promise you, your customers will tell you they want to help you. They want to help you get better. They want to be invested in your success. You just have to give them the opportunity and the forum to do that, and then, most importantly, act on the feedback that they give you.
Do that, I promise you, you will sell more. You will have happier customers, and more of them will turn into super fans.
