Your Biggest Asset—Customer Success Stories!
It seems obvious. Your customers are one of your company's biggest assets. Everyone knows that. And, by the same logic your customer success stories should be your biggest sales and marketing asset. Yet, so many companies do not have case studies to support their sales and marketing efforts.
Customer case studies are one of the most versatile tools you can develop. They can be used in press releases, marketing material packets, and on your website—not to mention they add a great deal of credibility during the sales process. In fact, customer success stories are your best sales objection killer!
We recommend you create a customer case study for every market you target, every product/service you offer, and every common sales objection you face. Keep them to one page with a 2 paragraph version you can use in email and proposals. Each success story should include:
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The Challenge/Trigger Event. This section of the case study explains the challenge or pain your customer experienced or the benefit they were seeking. Basically, here you are introducing why the company needed/wanted your products/services. What problem was your customer looking to solve? Keep this to 3-5 sentences.
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The Solution Implemented. In this section, you want to detail what your company did to solve the challenge discussed earlier. What product or service did you provide and how did you come to the conclusion that this would solve the customer's problem? Did you customize the solution beyond what the product or service already offered? Did you integrate into existing systems or processes? Focus on the unique features, benefits, approaches you took to solve the problem or meet the need.
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The Result. When discussing the results, you highlight how your solution has helped this customer. What significant change has your product/service had on the company? Have they enjoyed any productivity or hard cost savings as a result? What differentiated you from your competition? If you had to train anyone, describe who and what you did. Also mention if your company delivered what was promised on time and budget—focus on showing how you were successful. Be as quantitative as possible.
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The Customer's Thoughts. Every good customer success story ends with a positive quote from the customer. It doesn't need to be longer than a sentence, but needs to reflect the key benefit the customer experienced when working with you and using your solution.
The power of a customer story comes when you can weave the above elements into a compelling story that highlights your offering from the customer voice. Understanding this is one thing. Getting customer stories written is quite another. We recommend you take the following approach to collecting your best customer stories:
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Identify your most representative customers (market, product use, sales objection faced)
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Survey the customer and maybe even your internal team (sales, service, etc.) about the specifics of the above elements. This can be done through a web survey, in-person call/visit, or incentive mailing.
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Write the story yourself. Because your customers don't have the time to write your case studies for you, we've found writing the story based on their survey to be the most effective way to get the job done.
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Submit it to your client for approval and a quote.
Having a cross section of customer success stories creates a low-cost-to-develop marketing asset that delivers a big impact to your sales and marketing efforts. At the very least you should be gathering customer testimonials from every sale and peppering these powerful nuggets throughout every communication vehicle—brochures, websites, proposals, emails, etc.
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The Sales and Marketing Toolkits BUNDLED contains:
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Over 60 sales and marketing templates (DOC, XLS, PPT, and PDFs)
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Loads of "how-to" articles and examples
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8 Training sessions (MP3 audio files) for your computer or iPod
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