I have to admit, I love the Economist. My only problem is that it arrives once a week and it takes me longer than a week to get through all of the interesting articles, so I always have 3 or 4 hanging around the house. In the Technology Quarterly section of the March 7 edition, there was an article entitled, “Fair Comment” focused on online consumer reviews that makes some points that I think are relevant to B2B customer success marketing.
"After about 20 reviews of a product are posted, ‘We start to see more reviews – it starts to accelerate, says Sam Decker, the CMO of Bazaarvoice”. Much like consumer reviews, the more case studies a company has, the easier it gets to recruit another customer to participate. From my experience, getting that first case study can be tough, so don’t worry about being overly selective. Capture an initial 3-4 case studies and then it becomes much easier to convince other customers to join your program, particularly if you give customers the credit they deserve in your initial studies.
“No one trusts all positive reviews”: Don’t be afraid to include a mistake your company made, or an unsuspected challenge in a case study, as long as you did what was necessary to satisfy the customer in the end. Case studies that read like a fairy tale just don’t come across as credible to prospects. It’s better to share the whole truth; the fact that the customer is willing to share their story shows that your company was committed to deliver results. “Displaying recent reviews indicates that people are still interested in the product”: I am frequently reviewing company case study pages where the most recent case study is from 2007 or earlier. It’s important to continue to add new relevant case studies and cull old ones that are no longer associated with your company’s current offerings, so it’s easier for prospects to find the right study. I like to recommend as a rule of thumb that 25-30% of your case studies be less than a year old. “Amazon recently changed its ranking system. Now the helpfulness of reviews is taken into account…”: Having quality case studies is just as important (if not more important) as having a large number of them. In the success stories we capture, we try to put ourselves in the shoes of the prospect, and answer as many of their tough questions as possible. We’ve found a steps to success ‘how to’ approach that allows the prospect to envision solving a similar problem using our client’s solution to be the most effective.
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