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 Part 1 of this four part series, I’ll highlight how to get sales buy-in to support your effort. The sales team is on the front lines with customers and prospects and hear firsthand the challenges and successes they are having. Having the bought in is critical to a successful program.
Fortunately, sales teams understand the value of customer evidence as this is one of the key requests coming from their prospects. Since the Sales team has a vested interest and has built key relationships during the sales cycle, Comms teams need to partner with sales to surface great customer stories.
While most sales teams understand the value of customer evidence, they earn their living from selling, not marketing. Their primary concern is getting customers in the door and everything that distracts from that goal is taking money out of their pocket. Many will view gathering customer evidence as your job, not theirs, so you’ll have to do some work to get sales to take an active interest. Here are three things you can do.
- Compensation – One key way to flip the dynamic is to ensure your sales team gets compensated when they help generate the customer evidence assets you are tasked with providing. Press releases, case studies, videos, logo usage, event participation, etc. should all have a financial compensation amount tied to them so that sales knows their hard work securing customer approval will be rewarded. To keep sales engaged throughout the creation and approval process, make this compensation dependent on the publication of the final asset, not merely gaining customer agreement to participate.
- Structural commitments – One great way to help sales drive the conversation with prospects about participating in customer evidence programs is to build it into the contract negotiations. Having a publicity clause in your sales contract that outlines a specific set of deliverables and a timeframe for when those assets need to be approved enables the sales team to have a dialogue about marketing support as part of overall deal conversation. Not only does this set expectations with the prospect but it also provides another lever for sales to ensure your company gets value out of any discounting required to secure the deal.
- Sales leadership buy-in – Of course, you may do both things above and still be undermined if sales leadership is not aligned with your goals. In many companies, sales will gladly allow the publicity clause to be negotiated out of the contract if it means closing the deal and, in high dollar value transactions, you rewards for securing customer evidence assets are going to pale in comparison to the sales commission. You need sales leadership’s help in building a culture within the sales team that understands that fighting for these key assets is crucial to everyone’s success.
What other strategies can help the Corp Comm team work closely with their sales colleagues to build a customer evidence program? Comment below.
In part 2 of the series, I’ll look at building relationships with your customers that you can call on when necessary.
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