If a tree falls in the woods, but nobody is around to hear it, did it actually fall? If you create customer stories and case studies, but the content isn’t relevant to the right segment of buyers and customers, your sales team, and customer success, does it even exist?
The next time a stakeholder in your business says, “We need X number of case studies/customer reviews” start by responding with, “Why?” Instead of just getting to work. You deserve to spend your time wisely by being proactive rather than reactive!
Why do we need a new case study? Why do we need more reviews? What part of our growth strategy should these efforts support?
Aligning Customer Stories to Strategic Growth Goals
If your stakeholder doesn’t have an answer that mentions the organization’s strategic growth goals try asking questions that reveal the target segment:
- Are we moving upmarket and selling to larger clients? (This tells you what size to target)
- Are there specific industries we’re trying to expand in or break into?
- Are there products we’re aiming to upsell/cross sell to new customers? (Target those who have already expanded their footprint in the same way)
- Are we moving towards multi-threaded persona targeting to support the expanded stakeholders required to approve new purchases? (Check out TrustRadius Buyer disconnect report for details on new buyer trends)
- Are there new objections/fears/doubts that our buyers have been voicing during the sales cycle? Or that customers have voiced during renewals?
These are just a few examples guaranteed to ensure your customer stories will garner a captive audience. And in the process of asking them, you may make some inroads and build trust with teams that have been hard to collaborate with in the past. Hint, hint: Sales or CS.
Starting with “why” over time will enable you to be more prescriptive when it comes to the projects you spend your time on. It will also help you tie into critical GTM goals, and help reduce customer burnout!
How SlapFive Helps to Scale the Approach
SlapFive’s member and company profiles and request fulfillment center ensure you can segment your clients on-the-fly by any criteria related to the needs you’re looking to fulfill.
Need to find someone to write a review who migrated from a legacy solution, and uses your newly launched product? And whose company logo is publicly sharable, hasn’t been asked to do more than 3 advocacy activities this quarter?
SlapFive aggregates all of that information from your CRM and CS platform into a single view. You can quickly send personalized asks for customers to record a video, audio, or text snippet instead of the shotgun blast approach.
The SlapFive content publishing engine then enables you to quickly create landing pages that answer the questions, fears, and doubts that your buyers in any segment may have. The SlapFive templates are in a much easier-to-consume format than any traditional 3rd-person case study with a happy quote.
See more examples and learn more about why buyers and sales reps prefer SlapFive customer stories and case studies aligned to buyer concerns here.