Who doesn't want to grow their business this year? I know I do.

Writing articles for Forbes and Inc. over the years, I've gotten to meet and interview lots of outstanding leaders who have grown massive companies.

I'm always most intrigued by their mindset, particularly around marketing. Although I own a marketing agency, I have to honestly admit that most of the stellar leaders I meet didn't grow their companies because they figured out the secrets to Facebook advertising.

Instead, they focused on the #1 most overlooked marketing trick there is, and ironically it's the first trick in the whole business book:

Incredible customer service.

Everyone wants to increase word of mouth (WOM), but few are willing to do what it takes.

What does it take? It takes the following:

1. Map out your entire customer journey. Get a whiteboard and a four-hour time block, and truly put yourself in the customer's shoes to figure out how your customer finds out about you, tries you, buys you, etc.
2. Figure out where all the opportunities are to communicate: Pre-sale, during sale, post-sale, weekly, monthly, on special occasions, it can be anything that relatively fits within your mission or purpose.
3. Figure out where everything will go wrong. What happens when the customer gets unhappy? What actions do you want them to take? How will you respond? (How much time have you spent to date coming up with a strategy for this? I bet not very much...)
4. Design the whole process, start to finish, that touches all these potential points above.