Are your sales teams struggling to convince potential customers of the effectiveness of your solutions without concrete case studies to back them up? Do they find themselves searching for compelling success stories to share during sales pitches and business reviews? If so, they’re not alone. In the realm of sales enablement, stories of customer success are invaluable tools for building trust, credibility, and ultimately, closing deals.
What are stories of customer success?
Let's start by defining what we mean by "stories of customer success." These are instances where a customer experiences tangible success with a product or solution. It could be as straightforward as achieving specific objectives or overcoming challenges with the help of a particular solution. These stories are not only interesting but also essential for prospective customers who want proof that your offerings deliver results.
But here is the challenge: Often, these success stories go undocumented and unnoticed within the business. Salespeople are left scrambling when asked by prospects, "Who else are you doing this for, and what kind of results are you achieving?" Without concrete examples to share, it's challenging to build trust and credibility with potential customers.
So, where can you find these untold stories of success? They're happening all around you, every day. Whether it's in the mundane delivery of services or evidenced in program summary reports and quarterly business reviews, these success stories are there for the taking. However, they're often overlooked or not recognized as valuable within the business.
To tackle this challenge, you must proactively take steps to identify, capture, and share these success stories effectively. Start by empowering your customer success teams to recognize the value of their work. Help them understand that they need to spotlight customer achievements as successes. Next, ensure they capture the necessary information in a format that can be easily summarized and shared within the context of your business. This includes details like the customer's name, industry, objectives, challenges, solutions, and results, as well as any charts or graphs documenting the outcomes. Providing a clear outline for this process will streamline the capturing of these stories and make them more accessible for your sales teams.
Customer success teams are overwhelmed.
However, it's important to recognize that customer success teams are often overwhelmed with managing customer relationships and may not be inherently motivated to gather this data. Consider implementing incentives or incorporating them into their quarterly KPIs to make the effort worthwhile. By taking these proactive measures, you can ensure that valuable success stories are not overlooked or underutilized in your sales enablement efforts.
But what about those situations where the customer opts to keep their name confidential? In these instances, you can still share the story in a more generalized manner by emphasizing the challenge, solution, and achieved results. For instance, imagine recounting a scenario where a customer sought a partnership that offered fresh and innovative approaches to address their everyday business challenges. In this case, you can describe how your account team closely collaborated with the customer, brainstormed multiple solutions, and ultimately developed a successful program that blossomed into a fruitful business relationship. While protecting the customer's anonymity, you can still mention their industry and products (such as a global data storage provider). Above all, maintain honesty, relatability, and focus on the actual events. By incorporating these stories into our sales efforts, we can differentiate ourselves from the competition and build trust with potential customers.
Not just anecdotes, but powerful tools.
Stories of customer success are not just anecdotes; they're powerful tools for building credibility and trust with prospective customers. By capturing and sharing these stories, we can showcase the real-world impact of our solutions and demonstrate our commitment to delivering results. It's important that this information becomes part of the lore and lexicon of how sales differentiate solutions for their customers.
Stories of customer success enable sales with ready-made examples of the success that has been achieved, regardless of whether there is a documented case study. Successful teams socialize these stories in training programs, knowledge bases, and content platforms in a way that makes them quickly accessible for salespeople to share the uniqueness of their business in a way that is relatable to a customer and the challenges they are facing.
So, embrace the power of untold stories, and equip your teams with powerful stories of customer success.
About the Author:
Terry Arnold is the principal and founder of TA Consulting Service a firm focused on providing Sales Enablement consulting services to mid-market and enterprise level customer-facing teams. He is a seasoned professional with a rich background fostering cross functional relationships with enterprise level organizations to create GTM strategy and enable revenue generating teams.
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