3 Reasons to Spread Customer Stories INSIDE the Company
An account team in New York City knocked the socks off a client with an approach. On the other coast, a team in San Francisco has hit equally impressive results with another client.
Same company, just different, non-competing account teams.
This global company counts tons of the Fortune 500 among its client base, and does some of the most innovative things in its industry. Yet, account teams around the world know little about what their colleagues are doing on other projects – seriously hindering their ability to bring new ideas to their respective clients.
But that will soon change. This worldwide marketing company just kicked off a program to capture its campaign success stories. They’re interviewing their account teams about what worked and the specific results clients saw.
They create one-page campaign success stories and accompanying PowerPoint slides, and make them available across the organization.
While customer success stories are powerful for marketing, they pack just as much punch for internal purposes.
Here are three reasons why customer stories are critical INSIDE your company.
1. Sales training
If your people don’t know what’s fully possible with your solutions, they can’t truly sell them.
“If sales people are shown multiple customer stories and understand how their offering significantly impacts potential customers, they’ll pursue accounts much longer and with a clear picture in their mind of how they can positively affect the prospect’s business…This is much more important than most people realize,” says Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies.
Include customer stories in your sales training and continuously share new stories with reps – in meetings, conference calls, and on your internal network. Expose them to these fresh ideas and they’ll sell new and current accounts with full knowledge of what’s possible.
2. Employee morale
From the receptionist to the accounting department, your employees need a sense of purpose. Why do they show up everyday?
Show them why. Share your best customer success stories with employees at company meetings, events, in blogs and in your newsletters. Give them the end results of what happens at the company – happy, successful customers – and they’ll have a greater sense of purpose and “school spirit.”
In turn, they’ll also be better able to explain to others just what your company does and how.
3. Marketing
How can you create spot-on marketing messages without knowing the value you deliver for clients? What you promise customers should mirror what customers actually experience.
Interviewing customers about their experiences is like tapping a gold mine. You’re hearing exactly how they have been successful with your solutions – and more importantly, why it was worth the investment.
Smart businesses take those “key benefits” straight back into their marketing messages.
Bonus benefit #1: Using customer success stories inside your organization for sales training, employee communications and marketing planning means your stories don’t have to be approved by customers for public use. (Public approval opens the door to additional use in marketing, PR and sales.)
Just be careful. If your internal-only success stories and case studies are not approved for public use, consider keeping them unnamed or make it VERY clear to employees that they are not approved for external sharing.
Bonus benefit #2: Once you have the story documented internally, it can be easier to take that to a customer and ask for public approval to use it as-is, or to repurpose for a press release, award entry or sales presentation.
If you’re not using your case studies internally, you’re missing out – on sales, on employee morale and on business growth.
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