While I learned a lot about their approach from Saul during a lunch gathering, it was the insights that Mike and Saul shared at Third Tuesday Ottawa that brought it all together. They talked about driving from Florida to Texas in a van, stopping in fourteen cities along the way to dine and engage with customers. During that trip they unwittingly connected some of their customers to work on their own projects and engage in new opportunities. They talked about following their customers’ online activities (not in a stalking kind of way) and making sure to acknowledge personal and corporate victories, and do token gestures for people having bad days (sending flowers) or pining for something Canadian (shipping mustard and Triscuits around the world). In many cases, they use the phone, noting that email is an incredibly ineffective way to communicate.

If Karma Marketing is the umbrella to the FreshBooks approach, then two powerful statements offered by Mike outline an approach to make that happen.

• “I take care of my team; my team team takes care of our customers; our customers take care of our business.“

• “Engage in extraordinary experiences everyday“. There is a great blog post by Mike here that further explains his 4E philosophy.

The FreshBooks approach of having all new hires start by answering the phones and handling customer calls is a brilliant way to ramp up new hires on customer engagement and relationships, as well become familiar with the service that FreshBooks sells. It doesn’t stop there. Each employee does their reserve period on the phones on a rotational basis — like milu’im in the Israeli army.

As the evening wrapped up and people started to disperse, Saul joined the group I was with and offered some advice he suggested will save us spending $20 a year on a new Seth Godin book. “Be remarkable”, he said.

As I walked home, I remembered the book, Creating the Service Culture, which I’ve blogged about before. The premise of the book (written in the 1980′s) is that services and products are becoming more homogeneous so companies must distinguish themselves by how they manage their customer relationships. That sounds like FreshBooks.