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Welcome to the first in our 7-part series covering the use cases of customer success stories that, in our humble opinion, far too few companies are using.
And that’s no surprise. Marketing is an ever-changing game, and companies have a strong tendency to abandon produced content.
In fact, according to Highspot, 70% of content that companies produce goes unused.
So it’s not enough to just produce content. You have to know what to do with it (and why.)
Throughout this series we’ll be showing you innovative ways to make the most of your video testimonials so you can:
- Supercharge your remarketing efforts
- Make irresistible ads that talk in your prospects’ own words
- And even shorten your sales cycle.
Because there’s so much that can be done with your customer success video assets and so few companies doing it…
…if you do just a couple of things from this list, you’re likely going to be outperforming your competitors when it comes to efficient marketing spend.
Because customer success stories, when done correctly, aren’t just one thing.
They’re like a swiss-army knife for your business.
And the first blade we’re going to look at is sales enablement.
The Success Story Showroom
AKA: Your resource for killer sales enablement and undeniable proof of your awesomeness
To kick off our series with a bang, we’re leading with what might just be the biggest and brightest star of your marketing and sales efforts.
There are so many more juicy details on how to use video testimonials to scale up your business to come in this series, but…
If you’re only going to do one thing from our series, it should be the Success Story Showroom.
What is it?
A Success Story Showroom is
- A digital repository of all the video stories your company has gathered
- With each entry including a “story summary”:
- outcome stats
- a video link
- a captivating thumbnail
- ready-to-use social and email copy
- top quotes
- full article version (as a PDF)
- and a case study landing page, with all of the above
- Made searchable using key identifiers, including…
- Industry
- Size
- Customer Role
- And outcome
The assets for each story (video, article, thumbnails, etc.) act as resources for sales and marketing.
And the searchable terms allow you to quickly match your prospect’s desired outcome, role, or industry to those resources.
Is this worth the effort?
Research says it is.
In a Vidyard report, 93% of marketers said that video converts the same or better than any other content form.9
And having video content readily available enables sales and marketing to grab exactly what they need – when they need it.
Remember, 70% of companies’ content goes unused.
Part of why that happens is content isn’t accessible or isn’t available in useful forms like it is with the story summary in the Showroom.
More on the story summary in a moment.
But the takeaway here is that Success Story Showroom functions as an evergreen resource for your teams.
Imagine if…
- Your sales team always had the perfect quote in hand or the exact short clip that answered your prospect’s questions for sales calls and follow-ups.
- And marketing had an easily searchable bank to find the most stirring messaging or jaw-dropping stats to whip up campaigns that stoke your prospect’s desire.
With the right storytelling approach to your interviews, you can even use the case study as a landing page for ads itself.
Because the Success Story Showroom enables precise filtering, your sales team will be sending stories that connect like a heavyweight with your prospect’s questions and hesitations.
Leaving your prospects with nothing but proof you can do what you say.
And the real workhorse in the silo is the “story summaries”.
Story Summary
Each entry in the Success Story Showroom links to a “story summary”, where you can find:
- Video link
- A link to a professionally edited 1-2 minute video that’s ready to share with prospects for marketing and sales.
- Captivating thumbnail
- A few thumbnail options that highlight the most interesting quotes from the interview. This functions as a quick access resource for marketing teams to build out campaigns and for sales teams to use for follow-up emails to maximize the chances of being seen.
- Here it’s good to experiment with short and longer headlines, or even just your customer’s face and their company logo, if the brand is well-known.
- Ready to use social / email copy
- Pre-produced copy to use for promotion of your success story, based around the market’s identified pain points and dreamstates. All of which makes it easy for the marketing team to find stats and angles for their campaigns.
- Top quotes
- Pre Picked quotes of the most emotionally charged and persuasive moments in the interview to be used by sales for followup and marketing for crafting messaging that matches your prospects.
- Article version (either as a link or attachable PDF)
- A small article version of the success story, allowing it to function as a mini landing page for precisely targeted sales follow up.
- Case study landing page with all of the above
- A single story point for use as a landing page that includes all of the above. We’ll touch more on this in article 2 – increasing web conversions.
An example of a story summary page can be seen below:
How to do it:
The simplest way to implement a Success Story Showroom is to create a spreadsheet.
Include identifiers so you can search the silo via:
- Industry type
- Size of company
- Customer Role
- And outcome
Here’s what that might look like:
If you want access to a complete Story Summary “Check List” list you can hand off to your marketing team to execute, check out this Story Summary to do list documentation:
Is It Worth Doing?
If you implement nothing else in this series, the Success Story Showroom alone will power up your sales and marketing teams like never before.
It’s a versatile tool making use of your most versatile asset.
But: The silo needs to be updated. Markets change quickly, and sending a prospect your 5-year-old case study can make it look like you’re anything but cutting edge.
So it’s vital you continually build your Success Story Showroom out with fresh stories, even revisiting old ones to make sure you always have the freshest, most impressive stats for your efforts.
In fact, when you keep an up-to-date bank of video testimonials, there are 5 ways you can use the showroom for sales enablement:
The 5 Ways To Use Your Success Story Showroom For Sales Enablement
- Prior to a call
Use your Success Story Showroom to find video case studies that match your prospect as closely as possible. Then warm up your prospect by sending an email that includes the short version of your success story.
- On the call
It’s not unusual for prospects to ask if you’ve helped anyone like them when on a call. Sales teams can have the key stats in hand by having the Showroom open and in front of them when making the sales call. Then…
- After a call
Your sales team can follow up on sales calls with more details of the success story, the video, or another story of the same type. You can even build out video presentations with a series of success stories and a personalized video message from the sales rep (www.journey.io is a great tool for this.)
- Quotes and estimates
When sending quotes or estimates, your prospect is at the highest point of resistance.
Of course, your marketing and sales teams will have given them everything they need to know that you’re going to solve their problem. But it can be helpful to remind customers what kind of results they can expect, and tie those $ numbers to the outcome they need.
- Touchpoint and followup
Lastly if your company has long sales cycles, it’s useful to include your most recent and relevant successes in your regular communications.
This can be a direct link or a more subtle gif under your signature that frequently changes on all your sales team rep’s accounts (more on this later.)
Conclusion:
The good news is that if you already have a bank of success stories, you can put your Success Story Showroom together right now, it doesn’t take long to set up if you use our template above.
If you don’t have a bank of video testimonials yet, perhaps you can now see one aspect of the power of regularly creating these stories of your happy customers.
Whatever software you use, the most important thing is to make sure that each story is searchable using key identifiers that will help you and your teams find the information they need quickly.
We should also mention that by using a Success Story Showroom you’ll make implementing the remaining 6 use cases for video case studies easy.
Saving you both time and money by increasing accessibility and asset targeting power, and reducing busywork.
If you’re not subscribed already, sign up below for access to the full value of our 7-part series on the use cases for customer success stories.
Sign up for your free access to the series here
In the next article of this series, Cranking Up Your Web Conversions, you’ll see how those same customer success stories can be used on your website to increase conversions and build trust.
We’ll cover how to:
- Make compelling hero videos for above the fold
- Disarm objection bombs (before your prospects even reach out to you)
- And how to use case studies on sales pages to ‘prime’ your prospects for the sale
