How Not to Write a Customer Success Story (Part 3)

My apologies for going dark for a week. I’m in Austin, and we Austinites spent last week cooking in the dark, boiling drinking water, and watching a Texas winter’s worth of firewood disappear in four days. But where it was 5 degrees here last Tuesday, today it’s nearly 80 and the snow is completely gone. 

I’ve spent the past two blog posts telling you how bad most tech companies’ customer stories are, and suggesting you take a different approach to documenting your successes. Last time I urged you to do more to acknowledge your customer than just put their name at the top of the story. I made this suggestion because your reader, potentially your next customer, will be putting themselves in the shoes of the company in your story. If there’s nothing there for them to relate to, or if they come away thinking you’re hogging the spotlight, you’ve failed.

This week I want to get deeper into the head of your reader.

If you’re like most marketers, you have developed or have access to personas that drive a lot of your marketing strategy and content. But honestly, I seldom see so much as a hint of persona awareness in most customer success stories, and that makes no sense.

This is wrong for all kinds of reasons, but let’s address the most obvious one first: how do you even begin to tell a story if you don’t know who’s in the audience? If you want your customer story to be read by boards of directors, you tell a story that resonates with board members, right? If the person you need to influence is in purchasing or is a software engineer, your story has to assume an entirely different perspective.

There isn’t a competent marketer in the world who would disagree with that, but we nonetheless continue to churn out customer stories that want the reader – any and all readers - to come away understanding how clever and indispensable we are.

That’s a terrible, chronic blind spot, but it’s easy to address. Wear your marketer’s hat when you’re writing a customer success story. Think about who your reader is, what they are looking for, and how the good work you did with someone else can inspire or placate or motivate your reader:

Your reader has career aspirations. What are they? What does the persona of your reader tell you about that?

Some people aspire to notoriety, don’t they? They want to acquire influence; they want to stand out. Bury the contribution of your reader’s counterpart in the story and you’ve just tied one hand behind your back. I’m not saying that the reader will come away saying, “They can’t help me get to where I want to be,” if they don’t see their aspirations addressed in your story. But I guarantee that if you do address them, your story will have far more influence.

I’ve done a lot of work with data scientists, and I can tell you that many of them are not doing what they thought they’d be doing when they were in grad school. Many data scientists will tell you that they feel more like DBA’s than people wrestling with cutting edge technical challenges.

If your reader is a data scientist, do you think a customer success story that ends with happier and more fulfilled data scientists might be beneficial to your cause? Isn’t that the story you should be telling?

Life preservers aren’t a good look. Your reader may be grappling with something – they’re reading your story, after all – but I guarantee they view themselves as being competent, well-intentioned, working with a plan in a business context.

No one relates to being rescued. No one wants to think of themselves as helpless, stuck in a tower waiting for a prince. As I suggested last time, while you parachuted into the company in your story, did good work, and then moved on, your customer was on a continuum where there was structure and goals and metrics and processes.

Again, get inside your reader’s head. They perceive that they are looking for that last missing piece in the puzzle. They long ago figured out how jigsaw puzzles work. They’ve already got a table. They know what the thing will look like when it’s done.

And as much as it may hurt your ego, that’s your story. You put in that last piece of the puzzle. Because if your story is that the puzzle would still be in the box without you, you are asking your readers to picture themselves hanging on to a life preserver.

Next time I want to talk about how to make your finite set of customer success stories work harder for you.

I find the emotional side of marketing fascinating, obviously. I’d love to hear your views on the subject. Just drop your comments below. As always, you can reach me directly at don.roedner@c2bsuite.com. And stay warm…