Five ways in which SAAS companies can leverage their happy customers

Vikram Goyal

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Published in

Agile Insider

6 min readJan 26, 2022

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#4 Become smarter in leveraging user generated content

Unhappy customers are your biggest source of learning — Bill Gates

Its true that companies have a lot to learn from their happy customers. Listening carefully to unhappy customers can help you massively improve as a company. And that’s what all customer obsessed companies are so good at.

But equally important are your happy customers.

Today I want to talk about how — Happy customers are your biggest source of leverage.

There could be no better marketeers than your happy customers. That’s because people are more likely to trust words of praise coming from your customers rather than you.

In this article, I will talk about how product and marketing teams in SAAS companies can leverage their happy customers.

Here are five different ways through which your happy customers can help you grow faster and better.

1. Ask for a testimonials on software review websites

Almost 75% of buyers consult online reviews before purchasing business software — teamsupport.com

With so much reliance on online reviews, it becomes important to have a strategy for increasing your online reviews. Most popular review websites are G2, Capterra and TrustRadius.

Having a solid presence on online review websites offers multiple advantages in the long run.

You can use positive reviews on your website, as marketing collateral and for sales enablement
You understand your ‘positioning’/user perception in the market
You know what to improve in your product
You get to learn what your sales team can do better

So, if you spot a happy customer, make sure they leave you a helpful testimonial on the review websites.

2. Do Customer Case Studies

A marketing case study aims to persuade that a process, product, or service can solve a problem. Why? Because it has done so in the past. By including the quantitative and qualitative outcomes of the study, it appeals to logic while painting a picture of what success looks like for the buyer. — Hubspot

A case study demonstrates how a customer was successfully able to solve a problem or complete a job using the respective product. These help build trust and establish your effectiveness as a solution.

Case Studies can be used in myriad ways. Some of these include:

Sales Enablement — These can be showcased by sales teams when they are pitching to prospects in a similar segment.
Used as marketing collateral — These can be uploaded on your website for easy access. Inbound prospects can land on it and get a flavor of how the product might be valuable to them. Snippets of these conversations can also be used as testimonials on the website home page or posted on social media.
Provide guidance — Newer customers and your own internal teams can get valuable ideas around using the product and deriving maximum value from it.

3. Build a strong referral loop

One of the biggest banes of the sales process of a SAAS company is the high customer acquisition costs (CAC). Companies need to spend so much on paid marketing before they are able to generate leads willing to listen to your sales representatives.

To reduce CAC, a great strategy is to leverage your happy customers by building out a referral program that incentivizes them to reach out to your happy customers. Besides, research indicates that customers coming in through referrals have:

Higher conversion rates. (Referred customers have a 30% higher conversion rate than leads from other marketing channels)
Higher retention rates, which increases the net lifetime value of a customer.

This blog post is a good starting point for building a good referral program — helloroketto.com

4. Leverage User Generated Content

Almost every day, your users create invaluable content for you. This unique, trustworthy content can get you more traffic, leads and sales, but only if you use it right.-NeilPatel.com

Your happy customers are already marketing you via word of mouth, social media, blogs/podcasts etc. So, why not amplify their voices?

User generated content benefits you in a number of ways — Building trust and authenticity, creating social proof, generating free content which can be repurposed, helping you promote your brand across new audiences. — Source

Some ways in which user generated content is created:

Social Media posts/tweets by user’s mentioning their experience with a product.
Explainer videos on YouTube — Many customers/thought leaders often analyze products and share their comments regarding the same.

*User-generated videos about a brand (“earned media”), were viewed 10 times more often than official brand videos (“owned media”) on YouTube —* *Source*

Reviews given by users on review websites such as G2 without any incentive from the software company.
Blog Posts

Ways in which user generated content can be leveraged:

Use social media praise as testimonials on your website.
Repost the content on your own social media channels to widen its reach.
Use customer praise in your email and other paid marketing campaigns.

CovertKit featuring a customer testimonial on Facebook

Run social media campaigns around dedicated hashtags.

5. Creating Video Content with your happy customers

You can do exclusive webinars, panel discussions, live workshops involving your customers.

For example, Amplitude does a lot of masterclasses featuring its happy customers!

Reaching out to Customers and Incentivizing them

In order to scale your outreach to happy customers and drive results, I would recommend the following:

Use technology to automate the process — Track indicators of customer happiness such as NPS surveys, CSAT ratings. Whenever you get a high rating, send automatic emails requesting a review or case study from them. (Time is of essence here, so outreach must be immediate)
Incentivize customers by giving them a token of appreciation — It’s always good to appreciate someone when they do something good for you. Appreciation could be monetary — through a pricing discount, gift card or sending a company sponsored goodie to their place. Or it could be non-monetary as well — such as a personalized Thank you note.
Give your happy customers multiple opportunities to collaborate — Having an year long engagement with happy customers creates a win-win situation for both of you.

Conclusion

If cultivated well, relationships with happy customers can indeed be your biggest source of leverage.

Happy customers can help you in multiple ways — through reviews, case studies, user generated content, referrals and live video content.

So, what are you waiting for?

Its time to be strategic about leveraging your happy customers. Set clear goals, identify team members who will be responsible for driving these initiatives and invest in the right set of tools that will help you measure success.