Using Customer Stories to Sell
May
5
Written by:
5/5/2009 8:44 AM
Customer Stories
Stories from customers can be a powerful and effective tool in providing trustworthy information that other customers will favorably act upon.
In separate surveys taken at each end of the decade 1997 to 2007, family, friends and acquaintances kept the top spot in terms of “trusted sources of information.” However, “strangers with experience” moved into the second spot – over the media, bloggers and a company’s own advertising.
Companies can take advantage of this shift in thinking by using customer stories to provide an account of another customer’s experience, giving buyers the confidence and insight they need to make buying decisions. Several things make a customer story compelling. Business buyers need to substantiate their purchase decisions with specific business results. If those results stand out in the story, and are put in terms that matter to the prospect, they provide needed reassurance and justification.
An important consideration in utilizing customer stories as a marketing tool is that the more you can match the featured customer to the prospective customer, the greater the impact. The industry should be the same or similar, and the challenges the same. It even helps if the title of the person quoted matches the decision-maker’s title.
Some tips for making customer stories compelling include:
- Choose an angle that matches the motives of the audience.
- Craft a story that highlight the outcome that prospect wants.
- Use call-out boxes and descriptive headlines in written stories providing capsules for people who don’t have time to read the entire article.
- Give specific examples or anecdotes.
Customer stories can be used in company web site, handed out or emailed for one-on-one sales opportunities, and trade shows. Organizations can summarize customer stories in sales presentations, include them in newsletters to customers/prospects, use for in training sales reps, up-selling to current customers, in booklets that aggregate a collection of customer stories, in direct marketing, in sales letters, in proposals, in press releases.
from the book: Stories That Sell: Turn Satisfied Customers into Your Most Powerful Sales & Marketing Asset, by Casey Hibbard.