I was able to grab a couple minutes with Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, at the Conversational Marketing Summit today.

Cook is the very approachable and thoughtful leader of an organization cited by many as one of the better examples of how a company actually grows through word of mouth.

The idea that marketing today consists of having conversations with customers is one that is still meeting some resistance in the corporate and small business worlds. It occurs to me that the companies that have embraced it, are good at it and are growing comfortably inside this new way of looking at marketing, are the ones that already have an internal culture that is based in conversations rather than directives. These are the organizations that make it ok for their employees to point out and fix what’s wrong, to experiment and to take risks.

Conversational marketing relies heavily on authenticity and transparency – you can’t give those to your clients if you don’t own them in your business.

Cook talks about something he calls the “volunteer workforce” and offers some clues to the success of Intuit’s word of mouth model. Listen below.