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 Part 1 of this series, I discussed getting your sales team on board. Once you’ve got a sales team generating a pipeline of customer evidence opportunities, you need to create strong relationships that you can call on when needed. This generally requires getting sales to introduce you to the customer so you can engage them directly.

Some sales teams may be hesitant to introduce another person to the customer as these relationships are literally gold for them and they may want to tightly control interactions. They may also want to ensure customers aren’t being overwhelmed or confused by introducing multiple points of contact in your organization.

One way to overcome the sales team cautious approach is to let them know what your communication with the customer will look like and how you will incorporate the sales lead in that process. This could include pre-qualifying your requests with the sales person ahead of contact with the customer to ensure the relationship is in good shape and ensuring you copy the sales person on all communication.

In many cases, you’ll also need to overcome objections in your customer’s organization. A key way to do this is to highlight the benefits that participation will deliver for the customer. Those can include building their profile as a thought leader, introducing them to other professionals in their field or helping them shape the market in ways that will benefit them.

While the buyer may be willing to participate in your marketing activities, often times you’ll encounter roadblocks with the corporate communications team or the legal department.

If you’ve built in a structural commitment as suggested in Part 1, you’ll have some leverage when these objections arise. Throwing contractual commitments in the face of the customer isn’t advised but you can use the presence of a publicity clause to communicate to these other departments that providing customer evidence was an important part of the sales discussion and ask for their help figuring out a mutually agreeable way to honor that commitment.

You may also need to get the buyer involved to defend the deal they negotiated or highlight how participating will benefit the customer.

Once you’ve broken down the barriers to customer participation, you need to capture all the valuable information you are gathering in a central repository. I’ll talk more about that in Part 3.

What other ways can Corp Comm build strong relationships with customers to drive a customer evidence program? Comment below.