How Not to Write a Customer Success Story (Part 4)
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been suggesting things you could do to make your customer success stories more interesting and, importantly, more effective.
I’ve suggested that you should shift your story perspective to one where your customer - not your company – is at the center. In that context your role should be as a contributor to your customer’s ongoing progress, not as the linchpin that kept their wheels on.
I also recommended that you think hard about the reader of your success story, who in the end is the person your story must influence. Most customer stories are very self-congratulatory. This inevitably diminishes the role and image of your customer, but more importantly may influence how your reader thinks about working with you. You want your reader to think that you are going to make them a hero, by whatever measure is important to them.
I want to wrap up this series with some thoughts on how you can give your customer stories “legs”. In other words, how can you make your stories meaningful to a reader who is not in an identical position to the customer in your story.
This is really important. Let’s assume your audience comprises five principal industries and your solution has five dimensions or addresses five distinct problem sets. Absent any consideration of story adaptability or portability, you might feel compelled to come up with a customer story for every cell in that five-by-five matrix.
And if you’re IBM, with thousands of customers and thousands of customer content creators, you can and probably will fill in that matrix. But if you’re like most of us, customers who will agree to a success story are hard to find, as are marketing team members with time on their hands.
I’m a partner in a firm that, among other things, brings discipline and rigor to tech companies’ product strategies. Figuring out precisely what features to deliver to an audience that is big enough to sustain the company but select enough to overwhelmingly prefer your product over others’, well, is really hard for most companies to do.
What if I had just one customer story that documented a successful product strategy engagement? With one problem set, one potential market, one specialized technology, one industry? How do I make that story work for me over and over, regardless of the reader’s industry or technology sector?
If you’ve been following this series, it shouldn’t surprise you when I say that you need to think about what your reader ultimately cares about and address those things in your story. When you do that, you don’t end up with a collection of narrowly drawn profiles that are hard to relate to. Instead, you get a collection, each element of which says one or more of these things to your reader:
They listen well and learn quickly. No matter what you say you will struggle to convince your reader that you understand their problem, environment, and organization. Everyone thinks they are unique. And in reality, no matter how well you understand a particular space, you never walk into a new customer situation fully prepared.
That’s your leverage. Make it an asset. Make the reader who is concerned about your ability to grasp his or her situation understand that you hit the ground running, listening and learning.
They have a repeatable process. Write just about outcomes and your reader is likely to think “Anyone can get lucky. Without understanding how they did it I’m not sure I believe they can do it for me.” Document your process and your reader will see the scaffolding that surrounds your success. And they will have a much easier time seeing the path to your helping them too.
They will be committed to my success. We all tell prospects and customers that they are the sun, and we orbit them. But if your success story provides proof of that claim your reader will feel more secure, even if they are in a different industry or have a different challenge.
How do you document commitment? Talk about things that went wrong – something always goes wrong – and what “above and beyond” things you did to make them right. And in the customer’s quote – more on this in a bit – have him or her testify to your commitment.
I understand what it’s like to work with them. This is really the key, isn’t it? Your story should make your reader want to work with you. Not because of your brilliance or your killer technology, but because you have left so little to their imagination from the start. Wanting to know what it’s like to work with you is a bottom-of-the-funnel phenomenon. Get ahead of the question, be open about it, and make that the thing you brag about.
Their customer is praising them for things that I care about. And then, lastly, the customer testimonial. These words, coming from your happy customer, are critically important and yet they are usually an afterthought. Too often the quote ends up being something like my satirical effort in the first post: “We get a lot fewer complaints about expense reports being on time now.”
Ironically, this is a place where you do want to insert yourself, because it’s the rare customer spokesperson who thinks about your efforts in terms that will influence your reader. I always try to author the customer quote myself, and then get their approval. I do this because I always want the customer to be saying “They were a great partner,” or “They were deeply committed to our success,” or “They have been our secret weapon in building the right product for the right market at the right price.” That last one is a quote from a C2B Suite customer success story. Pretty powerful, right? Better than “We get more stuff done on time,” that’s for sure.
When it comes to the customer testimonial, you want to put words that describe your universal value in your customer’s mouth.
I certainly hope this series has given you things to think about. If you take away nothing else, please turn a critical eye to the way you are documenting your successes. Make your success stories into a marketing asset that truly influences your customers-to-be. As always, you can reach me directly at don.roedner@c2bsuite.com.