Roots PR

Customer evidence is critical to building a successful B2B communications program. Journalists, analysts, influencers, prospects and even other customers want to hear the experiences of those who have gone before them.

But gathering customer evidence can be difficult for the Corporate Communications team as they aren’t front and center with the customer either during the sales cycle or during implementation. With a little work, however, you can build a great customer reference program that helps fuel your media relations, analyst relations and social media programs while also helping your sales and marketing colleagues close deals and build killer marketing content.

In parts 1 and 2, I detailed how you can build partnerships with sales and with customers to develop customer evidence assets. The third key to building a great customer evidence program is constructing a killer database of information on those customers that can be utilized across your organization.

Having a single source of information that allows anyone in your organization to quickly find a customer story that matches their needs can be a great accelerator for your business. When sales and marketing teams don’t have to rely on anecdotes or spend time “asking around” to find a great case study, you will inevitably be able to secure more references, produce more content and close more deals.

To start, key data should be captured every time a contract is signed including:

• Company name
• Company headquarters location
• Primary customer contact
• Lead sales person
• Products sold
• Sale date
• Deployed countries
• Publicity clause details
• Whether any partners were involved in the sale

Much of this may have been captured during the sales process so getting access to your sales team’s CRM system (for example, Salesforce) is critical. You may also want to get a commitment from the sales operations team to build your database within that CRM environment. This may require structural adjustments to add fields and help train people to capture new data points. You may need to build your own database in a spreadsheet or simple database program to get started.

Once you have this core information captured, you can start to build out your database to add additional details collected from colleagues in marketing, sales, implementation teams and customer service. This information should include:

• Implementation deployment date
• Any marketing materials like press releases, videos, webinars, online reviews and case studies that have been developed (and links to where they can be found)
• Quotes, documented benefits or success data that can be utilized

With this rich set of data, you organization can quickly find customer evidence that they can use to increase your profile and help sales.

In part 4, we’ll wrap up the series by closing the loop with customers by discussing how to reward them for their participation and create a virtuous loop that continuously feeds your program.

What other information would be valuable to capture as part of a great customer evidence program? Comment below.