Customer stories create a powerful and relevant means of communicating how you and your company deliver value to your customers’ business tables.
How do you currently drive customer loyalty and enhance the level of customer retention for your company?
Start featuring real-life business cases in your customer conversations. What problems did you address together? What issues were overcome as a result?
Allowing your current customers to become part of your ongoing story – and continuing legacy – makes you both investors in each other’s success.
This strategy, using customer stories, isn’t some slick marketing / PR tactic. After all, storytelling is the hallmark of humanity.
Customer stories are simply an honest recounting of the journey you and your customer take together, in order achieve relevant and valuable business outcomes. It means taking a 1080 degree perspective of what went on around the business table. It means telling the customer stories and talking about the stumbling blocks along the way to success.
Are your current customers – and how you earned their loyalty – part of your company’s story?
One of the best examples of a company using customer stories to enhance their value to the marketplace comes from a recent post on the Pipeliner CRM Blog. For those of you who aren’t familiar with PipelinerCRM, it is a new, well-tested, and highly visual CRM system offering the advantage of streamlining the time involved in information gathering and creating relevant reports.
This post is a full-blown business case of how one of their customers implemented the PipelinerCRM system into their own business development processes. When I read this post, I forwarded it to my own customers who experience similar problems.
Today’s sales processes are full of feature-and-benefit discussions that become far too product-focused all too quickly.
When you leverage customer stories to frame customer conversations, you keep the conversation high-level. You create empathy as you communicate value. You make the story about your customer, not about you.
Those are the types of conversations your customers aren’t expecting to have with you. Why not delight them?
Customer stories talk about how you created that loyal customer. What you imply to prospective customers, without having to make say some marketing or sales spiel, is that your company will devote that type of time and attention to every customer.
If you are looking for ways to create a compelling reason to do business with you, consider the customer stories you have yet to tell. These can become your greatest assets to driving new customer acquisition.
Babette N. Ten Haken, President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, is a professional development coach and management consultant. She develops Playbooks for startups and small to mid-size companies experiencing unpredictable revenue streams. Then she brings these Playbooks to life. Her Playbook on leadership, business development and sales collaboration strategies, including tools, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com.
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