Straight to the Point
Volume 1, Issue 2
This Issue's Contents:
Feature: Making Customers Part of Your Sales Force
Customer success stories can do more than provide credibility to your product or service. They can also extend relationships with your customers and make customers effective members of your marketing and sales teams. But to do it successfully, customer stories have to do more than say nice things about you.
Apply It!: How to Elicit a Customer Testimonial
Follow these seven steps to ensure customer success story victory.
Service in Brief: Customer Success Stories
Strong customer success stories can turn tire-kickers into buyers. Kaszas Communications offers Customer Story Writing Services that lend immediate credibility to our clients' communications activities, as well as providing you with media opportunities.
Don't Take Our Word For It
Kaszas Communications helped bootstrap Roaring Penguin Software by getting its marketing off the ground with a communications campaign that generated ½ the company's revenues within the first year. And we did it without e-mail! This article provides the highlights of that project.
Making Customers Part of Your Sales Force
Why it's not enough for you customers to say nice things about you.
At Kaszas Communications, we've noticed a trend over the past two years. Since the tech bubble burst, our clients are increasingly focusing their marketing communications around credibility statements - and customer success stories and case studies are key in that communications mix.
In our experience, customer stories are valuable from more than one perspective:
- They make great sales tools. Showing a prospect a story that mirrors their own problems and concerns, and demonstrating that you have already resolved those same problems for others, can move the process forward many steps. It can turn tire-kickers into buyers with the confidence that others have chosen your solution - and benefited.
- They are valuable PR tools. Editors need content. They need good, objective content, though, and that means real stories. Customer stories can be obtained by a company but held back until after the story is covered by media. Editors like exclusives.
- They engage reference customers in an ongoing relationship with you - as an extension of your sales and marketing team. The customer story is the culmination of one phase of relationship with the customer, and the beginning of a new partnership, in which happy and well-cared-for customers willingly provide ongoing references to other prospects and to media on your behalf.
Despite their value, there's a wide range in the quality of customer stories out there. To be truly valuable, a good customer story must do more than say nice things about you. This may sound counter intuitive, so let me give an example. I recently read a customer testimonial in which the customer complimented the company's receptionist but said nothing about the company's value to the market. It therefore had no value.
There were two problems at work. First, the customer writing the testimonial did not have appropriate messaging tools to speak about the service in a way that would serve the company's marketing and sales. Second, the company had never heard our First Rule of Customer Stories: Never, ever let the customer write the testimonial.
A good customer story does two important things:
- It conveys your marketing messages through the specific (and therefore compelling) experience, needs and voice of another person. That person should be representative of some portion of your target market -a particular audience you need to reach (CEO, CFO, CIO, IT manager, etc.), a specific market segment you are targeting (campuses, Fortune 1000s, small businesses, etc.), or both.
- Through the interview, writing and revision process, it teaches your customer about how you need to market your product or service, and exposes them - in a collaborative way - to the core messages you need to present to your market. Through this process, the customer is able to think through the way you want to present the story and refine it based on his own experience. This equips the customer with the same message strategy that your marketing and sales teams should be armed with, and effectively extends your sales and marketing team.
Depending on your goals, a customer story may take one of various forms:
- A brief testimonial quotation that hits key points in your marketing messages.
- A story format, which sets up the customer's problems, alternatives explored, solution chosen and results gained.
- A case study, which goes a step beyond the story and provides technical details about the implementation, hurdles overcome and new methods found to solve specific challenges.
- An article, presentation or case study authored by your customer and/or you and your customer together, and pitched to conferences and media.
No matter what kind of customer story you need, hiring a writer who is a skilled interviewer and expert in messaging and positioning is key. Speaking to a third-party in a controlled environment, the customer is more likely to share information because he does not assume the writer already "knows." In our experience, customers also often share more information simply because it is easier to do so to a third party. They may provide feedback on how the client can improve the product or service, and they often say things the client loves to hear but didn't expect.
In the words of one of our clients, Bill Caswell of Caswell Corporate Coaching, "I was impressed with the way Kaszas Communications conducted interviews with our clients and elicited fantastic commentary from them. The customer testimonials Kaszas wrote for us are not just positive - they help us to better communicate the value we bring to a client's business."
This issue of Straight to the Point is devoted to Customer Stories. Read Apply It! for a step-by-step process toward achieving successful customer stories. Find out how one of our clients has successfully used customer stories to generate media coverage that has lead directly to sales, in Don't Take Our Word For It. And, for a description of our Customer Success Stories service, read Service In Brief.
Enjoy!
Maria Ford
President
Kaszas Communications
Apply It!: How to Elicit a Customer Testimonial
Turn your happy customers into a powerful sales force.
Creating strong customer testimonials and stories requires a process. Here are the steps:
- Plant the seed. Mention the possibility of a case study or success story during the late sales process. Mention it again as the product trial or implementation progresses. Where possible, negotiate with lead customers to include testimonials, a press release and case study in the letter of commitment or sales contract.
- Hire a third-party writer. Never, ever let a customer write the testimonial (see our Feature story for details). The writer you choose must be experienced in writing stories and expert at creating and conducting effective interviews. The content of the story depends entirely on the quality of questions asked - and the way in which they are posed. Look for a writer who can provide relevant samples, who has an established interview process and can speak about that, and look for a writer who is skilled in using language to position companies within a market. A journalism background is good; a marketing background is better.
- Know your key messages. As good as the writer may be, s/he needs to understand your goals and agenda for the story up front. Beware of a writer who does not research or ask to understand your market positioning and challenges first - without this foundation, it won't be possible to conduct an interview that elicits the right information. Be prepared to share this information:
- Your target audience for the story
- The main points you'd like the story to convey about the product or service
- Challenges the customer had that may arise during the interview, and how the writer should (or should not) incorporate these into the story
- Exactly what the customer project consisted of: which products and which services were purchased
- Facts that should be played up, and those that should be played down
- Define the story. Based on your key messages, help the writer define what the story's "spin" will be. For example, a telecommunications product company may want a particular story to help generate more wireless sales - so the story should have a mobility spin. A services company may find that they are more successful in sales when they can present a concrete product to their prospects - so the story should focus on concrete aspects of the service provided, such as a methodology, a process and quantifiable results.
- Prepare the interview. Next, expect the writer to prepare the interview. Do not create the interview for the writer, but do ask to review the questions and provide feedback before the interview takes place. Let the writer ask "dumb" questions - don't fill in all the blanks for her. In our experience, some of the best story content arises from asking the questions that have seemingly simple answers.
- Craft the story. Based on the above process, the writer should be able to produce a first draft of a story that is on the mark. When working with a new writer or on a particularly important or unusual story, you should request to review the draft and help craft it before it is sent to the customer for feedback and approval.
- Be open to the unexpected. Be sensitive to the fact that problems may arise if the writer encounters an interview subject in less than ideal circumstances - everyone has bad days. More often, though, the "unexpected" will work in your favor. We have drawn out stories that a company didn't realize were there - it's all part of the potential value of having a third party write your customer stories.
For details about Kaszas Communication's Customer Success Story writing services, read Service In Brief, or contact us at info@kaszas.ca.
Service in Brief: Customer Success Stories
As this issue emphasizes, strong customer success stories can lubricate sales and help turn tire-kickers into buyers. Kaszas Communications offers Customer Success Story writing services that lend immediate credibility to our clients' communications activities, as well as providing strong media opportunities.
Our approach is to ensure that your customer testimonials do more than say nice things about you. We focus our interview and writing process on making a business case for your offering that encourages others to buy.
Our proven process for interviewing your clients and writing their stories results in dynamite testimonials and case studies that:
- Draw out the true value you bring to your customers' businesses
- Engage the reader with business details they can relate to
- Serve as highly effective tools to overcome sales objections
- Are publishable in many forms: on the web, as advertorials, press releases and more
- Appeal to industry editors and analysts
For details, contact us today: info@kaszas.ca or 613.741.9484.
Don't Take Our Word For It
Roaring Penguin Software Communicates Profit
A software consulting firm, Roaring Penguin Software, had developed a customer project into a full-blown anti-spam product for enterprises, called CanIt. Its goals in engaging Kaszas Communications were to generate momentum and awareness for the product, achieve initial product sales and make a business case for re-focusing the company on developing, marketing and selling commercial products.
As a bootstrap operation of one, Roaring Penguin had a tight budget
and as an anti-spam solution provider, the company could not use e-mail to get its messages out. Since that time, the client has become, in the words of VP Marketing and Sales Bill white, "a demonstration of the power of marketing in the bootstrapping process."
From a marketing perspective, we needed to:
- Reposition the organization away from a consulting model toward a product model. Many technology companies experience this challenge, and "productizing" is never simple.
- Refocus the organization on a new target audience. The company's beta test customers and "friendly" leads were drawn from a community that was unlikely to turn into a lucrative source of revenue.
- Change market perception of the company and create acceptance for the product. The new commercial product was based on the client's own free software, creating a challenge in encouraging the market to accept the client as a commercial product developer, and convincing prospects to pay for a product that had a widely available free cousin.
- Generate initial awareness on a small budget. The client needed to generate leads from a broader pool of prospects.
A Winning Communications Mix
Our initial communications strategy and tactics were designed to take best advantage of the company's strengths and reference customers. We created a gradual transition to enable the client to first harvest its existing and most "friendly" audience for initial revenues and success stories, while laying the groundwork for growth beyond this niche. To do so, our communications:
- Separated the product and corporate brands by creating a separate web site and collateral for the product. This allowed Roaring Penguin to offer a commercial product without having to make a radical shift in the corporate brand - a time-consuming and costly process. The product web site referenced - but did not brand - the company.
- Developed key messages to position the product that focused on:
- The benefit to the customer to create interest.
- A key differentiator to distinguish the product.
- A credibility statement. Initially, this statement focused on technological precedence that the client had established.
- Statements to position the product among other alternatives.
- Leveraged beta customers for success stories, media interviews and publishable testimonials.
- Invested in search engine advertising and public relations to build awareness and reach a target audience that is web-savvy and online - without using e-mail.
Generated 5x the Revenues
Today, Roaring Penguin is able to trace 50% of its first-year sales directly back to the marketing and public relations efforts that Kaszas Communications develops and executes. Even better, Roaring Penguin's VP Marketing and Sales, Bill White, says, "We have seen a 5x increase in average monthly sales, and that is directly attributable to the marketing and PR campaign designed by Kaszas Communications.
"By refining the messaging and identifying the early-market adopters, [Kaszas] focused Roaring Penguin onto the all-important early successes that everything else is built upon. We have a gazillion competitors out there, most of whom are going to fail because they got the marketing wrong at the start."
As momentum increases, sales grow and the initial product matures into a complete line, we have maintained consistency in our messaging, while refining the core messages to:
- Begin merging the corporate and product brands. Today, many users of the free product are making the shift to the commercial product, and merging the brands is proving effective.
- Focus product messaging on unique vertical markets, learning from the customers, developing product features that meet their unique needs, and targeting messages to their specific concerns.
- Add to the technology credibility message with market credibility messages by securing customer announcements and case studies. White notes, "As a result of the PR component of our marketing plan, we've received coverage in trade magazines that has been critical in our growth" - one publication's coverage of a customer success story alone generated 10 highly qualified sales leads.
Back to Basics: Good Communications Yields Results
What sets Roaring Penguin Software apart from others and lets them reap the benefits - and quantify the results - of their marketing and PR? Quite simply, they practice excellent, consistent communications. They hone communication to specific audiences without disrupting their core messages. They listen to customers and tell their stories.
As White puts it, "Roaring Penguin is a demonstration of where marketing has its strongest influence. Increasing our Sales by 50% has let us build the company we wanted to build."
