The most powerful way to win new customers is through the business testimonial. This is a form of building trust. It tells the story of how you delivered your products or services and what it means to work with you. New customers do not know you and are looking for what it will be like to do business together with you.
However, the opportunity to capture a business testimonial is often lost because we are so busy doing work and forgetting to capture the stories. Those stories are what illuminate your hard work and help your future customers see themselves in the story of past customers.
Our team at AscendWorks has worked thousands of hours on marketing systems and sales process. Many of the success stories of our customers are ones we talk about with each other. However, we do have our own processes for capturing business testimonials that we thought we would share here as well. Here are seven marketing tips to help you in your own process for capturing and distributing testimonials:
- Interview with video testimonials. Video shows the facial expressions of a person and communicates their tone and enthusiasm. Use video in a powerful way in the editing process to augment the tone and the story. We have our onsite video consultants ensure the lighting and sound are perfect. A tangential view of the shot with a casual question and answer helps your customer relax and answer candidly.
- Capture testimonials after success. We seek to interview our customers right after a project launch or a key milestone has been achieved. The emotion is fresh and authentic.
- Use group chat meetings. If we are unable to capture video, we move decisively towards setting up a group chat meeting using 37Signals’ Campfire chat tool. This allows for real-time give and take and makes it easy to transcribe the content of your chat into a useful post on your blog.
- Post customer success stories online. Use your corporate blog to categorize your business testimonials and success stories. Ours are at our AscendWorks blog under the Case Studies category. We keep it growing and it allows readers to peruse the stories ongoing. Our Salesforce Success Blog also has a Case Studies category with content and video for those specific projects and customers.
- Optimize your content. Your content should be be found. Ensure it is optimized for SEO with keywords and content scoring. There should be hyperlinking to relevant sites as well. It will live on the internet for those searching for testimonials or stories similar to their own. Thus, your success stories are repurposed to attract new buyers as it is indexed online with the search engines.
- Use stories in your sales process. For prospective customers that are in your pipeline, allow your business testimonials to be easily searched and found by your sales team. They can send the links of these testimonials to relevant leads they are working with to help them see their story in one of your past customers’ stories.
- Create an ongoing process. As part of your project management or service delivery process, formalize the process for capturing business testimonials and make it easy for anyone on your team to interview and publish the content from your process. Lay out the process in an easy way for it to be natural and build up your library of testimonials this way.
By publishing your case studies in an easily accessible and organized manner, you will provide a self-service method for your leads to understand who you are and what you do. They will see and hear it from credible sources – past customers that have invested in your products and services.
If you would like to learn more or get some help setting up this process or delivering this service, connect with us and we will be happy to help. This is one of the most strategic marketing approaches for your business you can use to help build trust with new buyers with the stories of your customers.
What would a business testimonial process do for your business?
