How you can generate an on-going stream of customer testimonials and win more business

Firms know that good customer endorsements can help to close orders.  The problem for many firms is how to create really powerful case studies, time after time.  By taking a simple, structured, approach to the process, you can create a regular stream of testimonials that will help you accelerate sales opportunities and improve conversion rates.

Whilst customer testimonials can close deals, finding good ones on a regular basis is often a problem.  You need a regular stream of new endorsements and case studies to keep moving forward. Many “age” and can give out the wrong perception if used too often or for too long.

Here’s a framework you can use to create a structured approach to generate an on-going flow of customer endorsements and testimonials.  It identifies activities that can be rich sources of candidates to help promote your business.

Let’s take a brief look at each source.

Customer Service

How you engage and handle inbound customer contacts sets the tone of the relationship from the outset.  Customer experience really is the first, and easiest, source for capturing positive comments about your business.  Resolving enquiries and solving problems will have customers warming towards you.  Ask customers if they would be prepared to let you feature their query within your FAQ facilities.  

Then use social media to post about the query and publicly thank your customer for their support in letting them be quoted.  The social publicity will reinforce positive emotions towards your business.  Then consider motivating your customer service team to suggest candidates for case studies each week.  We’ll talk more about this in a moment.

End-User Training

This source obviously only works if you have a relevant product or service.  Many products can provide a multiplicity of benefits but users need to become experts in order to reap the rewards.  

Investing time to train and support a few key users until they reach expert status, will result in a really useful source of on-going potential endorsements:

• By becoming experts, these users acquire a rare skill set that is valuable within the firm in which they work.  
• They will be sought-out by their colleagues which fuels their internal expert status.
• As experts, they are able to promote your product / service deeper into the organisation.  This protects their own position, helps your customer organisation, and widens the body of support in favour of your offering.

Maintaining a regular dialogue with these experts will provide you with many opportunities to identify how your product is adding greater value and so become an ideal source of future endorsements, case studies, and other testimonial stories.

User Forums:

This too is an option that may only be suitable for certain types of product or service.  Forums can be closed, private or restricted in nature or open to all.  Like any discussion group, you will need to invest time to moderate and engage. However, in doing so, you’ll have the opportunity to identify what customers like most about your offering. You may even be able to capture customer quotes that you can use in marketing material to support your competitive advantage.

You’ll also hear directly about customer dislikes, giving you the opportunity to respond.  It’s better to manage any negative trends as they emerge rather than let them get out of control.  Often, once customers understand why a feature is the way it is, many users accept it and so it becomes less of an issue.  

More to the point, you can use this forum to ask for ideas on what customers would like to see on the development roadmap – setting-up future orders!  Again, by monitoring user forums, you’ll be able to identify customers that you can approach separately as a candidate for a testimonial.

Case Studies:

This needs to be an on-going sales and marketing activity.  The stream of candidates should be structured rather than ad hoc.  Sales teams should be obliged to provide at least one candidate name each quarter which can supplement the feeds from the sources mentioned above.  

A dedicated resource should be assigned to the task of project managing and implementing the production of all case studies and testimonials.  This will help to ensure consistency and high standards throughout the process.  This is often outsourced but many firms have an in-house resource with this task specifically defined in the job description.  

Don’t forget to plan for presenting case studies using the full range of media; PR, video, web articles, blogs as well as the one-off case study PDF itself. 

Product Development:

This is where the most powerful testimonials are often created.  It requires identifying customers that you can work with to build and test prototypes of new products or services.  Obviously, it needs excellent stakeholder management.  Customers need to expect that the first few iterations will be flawed.  It’s their experience of working with you to resolve all the niggles that generates a really successful testimonial.  

The customer contacts involved become personally and emotionally involved in the process.  It’s this bond that helps lead to true advocacy.  Capturing the whole process in an extended case study is just one way to portray the experience.  The same content can then be used during speaker opportunities at events as well as promoting using the usual channels like PR, blogs, etc. 

Generating testimonials does take time and effort but the costs involved will be recovered many times over in helping to accelerate existing opportunities and closing more business.  The bottom line benefits are too many to risk leaving as an ad hoc process.  Make a point of following a simple structured approach to the process of creating testimonials and reap the rewards from additional business.

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Freelance copywriting for articles, case studies and business blogs.