Articles, Presentations, & Press Releases

Customer Success Stories

Customer successes, quotes and endorsements can help your marketing, launch and p.r. campaigns considerably. If you have real, live, paying customers for your product or service, extracting such information from the customer (with their permission) essentially proves your value proposition. It says: hey look, somebody bought it and likes it, and they derived all kinds of benefits from it and by the way, they are a very important person/company. Such material takes many forms, depending on how much material your customers are willing to disclose. Customer success stories are brief case studies that describe a customer problem, how your product solved the problem, and the exceptional business benefits that the customer received from it. Customer quotes or endorsements are much shorter but have the same purpose, and are attributed to some executive in the customer organization.

Formats
Customer endorsements are quite brief; just a sentence or two phrased to sound like a person is speaking and usually contained inside quotation marks. Below the quote is the person's name, title, and company or organization. It may seem insignificant, but the title of the person is quite important. It's reflective of a key decision-maker or person of authority. A "C"-level executive, such as CEO or CTO, would carry more weight than a "Manager" or "Engineer" title. There are some exceptions, however. If your target customer is not a management or executive-level person, then other titles might actually be better. Quotes should either relate to your target customer or target verticals, and the goal is to attract similar customers who can identify with the "quoter".

Customer success stories or case studies are much longer. They usually follow a format of Customer Description, Problem, Analysis, Solution, and Benefits. These success stories usually contain one or more illustrations, and may also have sidebars with key messages or customer quotes. The style is usually that of a business case, with sufficient detail to reveal the context of the problem and specifically how the problem was solved with your product.

Venues - Print, Web, and Events
Customer success stories may be printed in a format similar to a datasheet or brochure so that they can be used as part of marketing or p.r. campaigns and also as sales collateral. Customer quotes may be included as part of other printed marketing materials and sales collateral, and often appear in a company's press releases that are distributed over the wire and printed as part of a press kit.

The most common venue for customer quotes and success stories is the company's website. Once again, customer quotes may appear in various places embedded within other marketing content. Success stories are usually grouped and placed in designated sections of the site.

Customer quotes and success stories can also be live, as part of trade shows and conferences, seminars, media events, and user group conferences. It's a powerful marketing strategy to have one of your customers giving a presentation about your products on your behalf.

Key Trends
In cruising through multiple websites for all sizes of high tech companies, I found that the vast majority have devoted a sizeable chunk of website real estate to customer success stories. For some companies, there is a whole section of customer success stories with its own navigation button on the home page. Others have a section of customer success stories on each of their product pages. Sometimes the successes are grouped by vertical market or industry, so that site visitors can more easily find one that relates to their own business. These success stories are most often in the form of a case study, two to three pages in length. Unlike white papers, these are printable pdf files that anyone can download and read. Several companies use short quotes or endorsements attributed to customers by name or in sanitized form, such as "CEO of a Fortune 500 company". If it's sanitized, that means that the customer has not given permission to be mentioned by name. Short quotes and endorsements are used in various places on the website, such as on the product pages or in the news section within press releases.

The sales forces of high tech companies are increasingly using printed or electronic forms of customer case studies or success stories to leave behind with customers after a sales call. These endorsements from real customers can go a long way to overcoming sales objections. Sales people are also spending extra time to find new customers that can be used as reference accounts and sources for additional customer success stories.

Startups and young companies have a more difficult time generating customer success stories until their sales really start growing, but they are becoming more creative on how to leverage customer feedback. Many startups will persuade beta customers to be the subject of a case study or success story, even if that customer may not have paid money for the product. Such successes help the sales effort going forward, because they represent timely feedback from a real customer.

Traditional high tech marketing materials such as datasheets and white papers are now starting to incorporate more customer quotes and case studies within the body of the document. As customers become more skeptical about marketing "fluff", adding real customer feedback helps reinforce messages and provides more substance. Rather than a hypothetical statement about the how the product might address the customer need, adding a customer case study describes a real need and actual derived benefits. The overall result is a more powerful marketing document.