A company’s top performing salespeople should be… its customers.
In any world class sales team, the sellers will be competing for the title of “best salesperson”. That competition is entirely appropriate — great salespeople are competitive by nature. A friendly competitive environment is something which you want to foster.
But for the very best companies, the very best sellers aren’t on the payroll at all. That’s because they’re its customers.
Purchasers of your product or service want to know that the value which you claim you deliver is real. Whatever you do to establish yourself as a “trusted supplier” or “trusted advisor”, the truth is you’re biased and deep down your prospects know this.
So, the very best thing you can do is to have your existing customers talk openly about what you did for them:
- The characteristics of your relationship — your responsiveness, innovation and creativity — that when you commit you deliver.
- Were you a supplier or a partner? Your willingness to go the extra mile.
- The time it took — was it in line with expectations?
- And most importantly — the value which you unlocked — did you deliver at or beyond the claims you made (ideally with metrics if they’re prepared to go that far).
Start by delighting your customers
None of this is going to work if you don’t delight your customers, but of course that’s true for the overall success of your business. You want to generate word of mouth, spontaneous, referrals because what you do is so compelling that your customers can’t stop themselves from telling others about it.
Word of mouth works well in the consumer world — you probably remember a friend first showing you the Uber app — but often somewhat less well in B2B because your customer set isn’t always connected, and in fact in many cases specifically WON’T BE because they are competing.
To ensure that the good word spreads, you need to proactively put in place some activities which create that information spread….
HOW OMNEVUE WORKED WITH CITYAM TO DELIVER INSIGHTS FROM THEIR CUSTOMERS
Our portfolio company Omnevue has developed a platform for SMEs, enabling them to easily collect, organise and analyse their non-financial (ESG) data — all to international accounting standards.
The end result? Financial-grade, auditable ESG data and reports that everyone can trust and the transformation of mundane business data into powerful insights and opportunities that improves access to capital, profit levels and transition to Net Zero.’ Omnevue collaborated with London news media firm CityAM in their “ImpactAM” video series, which set out to uncover how leading thinkers are addressing the challenges facing our world.
CityAM produced a set of customer interviews which were published on CityAM’s YouTube channel and in shortened format on Omnevue’s one. Each video featured a senior customer executive explaining why they chose Omnevue, their experience in implementing the software, and the quality of the data which the product delivered. All of this leads up to ensuring compliance with incoming ESG reporting regulations. Even more important — the customers covered what they discovered from Omnevue’s reports which helped them to adjust some of their own business practices for example employee vacation policies. This type of customer testimonial further underlines Omnevue’s credibility in an important new sector, and provides prospects with independent feedback
Methods for spreading information about your company
There are well-tried methods, and some less obvious ones, which companies use to bring the work they do with customers into the light:
- At the most basic level: Interview your customers on video — load this on your website and on YouTube, and from this create spin-off written case studies, quotes, posts etc. Video, rather than written text, is the best method because you can repackage it so many different ways.
- Start with a small relatively unknown customer and work your way up as you win bigger and bigger ones. Bear in mind that there are sometimes smaller players who have well known and respected “voices” — when they speak others listen. Lean into them — you want to benefit from their credibility.
- You can incentivise them with additional credits or other benefits for spreading the word — but you want what they say to be genuine.
- Invite your customer to be part of an “early ship programme” where they gain early access to new product features in exchange for a testimonial. This can be especially useful to create marketing content ahead of a product release.
- Create a “qualification” which your customer employees display openly — thereby inviting others to ask them about their experiences with you. An example of this at scale would be the Cisco Certified programme (which has developed so far that it is now often a requirement in job specs). Then ask existing customers if they’re willing to contribute to the educational content by explaining how they successfully used your product.
- Institute a “Champion” programme which publicly recognises your expert customers (plus resellers and employees). IBM has run one since 2008 which recognises a small number of elite technology thought leaders who help others to make best use of IBM’s products. Applied with scarcity, this becomes a “badge of honour” to be added as a job title in LinkedIn profiles.
- Even just putting customer logos on your webpage helps.
Remember one of the best times to ask a customer to be a reference is when you’re negotiating the initial purchase. Request the right (an option) to do a case study in your contract — convince your customer that in asking for this you are committing to deliver a superb experience to them so that they can honestly shout about it — this is you putting it on the line. Give them the right to sign it off; you might as well, because you are only going to publish a case study with a willing customer. It can be a good idea to ask for this in exchange for agreeing to something the customer asks for in a negotiation (like a discount); that way, the customer feels compelled to do the case study.
But what if your customer says “we never do this”?
Not every customer is going to be prepared to share their experiences completely openly; many will require their sign-off on your final content as a minimum. Some larger brands are understandably very protective about when they’ll speak out, and what they’ll cover. That’s just the reality of the world — their marketing heads have ruled that they have more to lose than to gain, and they probably have 1,000’s of suppliers asking them to do this. But even if they won’t speak publicly in your marketing material, there are things which aren’t directly marketing content that they may still be prepared to do provided you do it with their prior agreement:
- Take reference calls from prospective customers. (Just be sensitive when they are direct competitors of each other!)
- Allow claims or quotes to be made without disclosing which organisation they are — for example “A top 5 US REIT”.
- Invite your customers to speak, perhaps jointly with you, at a technology or industry conference.
- Publish practical user guide material co-written with your customer — then acknowledge their name and company on the cover. Share that material with your prospects. Suggest that your co-authors could add it to their LinkedIn publications.
- Invite your customers to join a “Customer Council” where they meet as a group quarterly, and you share early sight of product plans and upcoming releases to get their feedback. Check with them that it’d be ok to invite a couple of your prospects to join each meeting — stand back in the coffee breaks and watch your customers sell to them for you.
Conclusions
There are many ways to have your customers help you to sell. Applied with some imagination, you can no doubt think of your own programmes to run. Bear in mind that sometimes it’s about helping individuals in your customer to increase their own personal brand as being forward-thinking or experts in their field — everyone wants to be known as an expert.
Pi Labs is always on the lookout for the next start-ups digitising and decarbonising the built world. If this sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you.
