by A. Bleecker
Aug. 30th, 2019
Queen Palm Media Insights
How to Get Your Success Story Customer Approved
As any marketing professional who’s been charged with acquiring a customer testimonial knows, the process of obtaining customer approval can be precarious. This is what makes the success story a high-risk-high-reward marketing asset (where risk = doing work for nothing and reward = a shower of praise from coworkers / contribution to your company’s success / whatever work high you chase—to each her own). As my West-Texan stepdad, a man of endless idioms, is fond of saying: it can be a long run for a short slide.
Why is the success story a risky venture?
Getting customer approval to publish a success story is the last step, which means it’s sadly not uncommon to do the scouting, interviewing, and writing, only to find those efforts are for naught when the customer reneges. Note: to learn about the work in danger of getting scrapped, check out our prior posts on how to find a customer testimonial and how to write a success story).
What’s behind this unfortunate series of events? In my experience, customer success stories fall through for one of two reasons:
The person you interviewed wasn’t senior enough to sign off on publication, so kicked the approving to Marketing or Legal, whose default response is no
There was a change with the customer—for example, the person you interviewed left the company, or the company was acquired by another—that rendered your spoken agreement obsolete
How can you avoid these circumstances? Sometimes they are simply unavoidable, but there are two important things you can do to increase your chances of getting a success story approved and published:
1) Carefully nurture the customer relationship
If the scouting and writing of success stories allow marketeers to play journalist, the approval process is a chance to dip our toes into the kind of relationship nurturing typically the purview of the sales person.
Keep in mind that in asking your customer to be featured in your company’s marketing materials, you’re requesting precious time and effort for which she will not be compensated. If a customer agrees to help you in this way, it won’t be because you went through an Excel spreadsheet of your customer base and sent a request via email to each, followed up by an authorization form to any who responded positively. It will be because she has had an exceptional experience with your company, but more so, because she likes you personally and thus wants to help you.
2) Stay in the gray
In my experience, the key to obtaining written approval has been to strike a balance somewhere between two poles: excessive due diligence and negligence. Overly standardizing the approval process bulldozes the relationship nuances you’ll likely need to leverage to get your success story approved and published. Send your customer official approval documentation written in legalese, and you’re likely to scare her into rethinking what she’s agreed to. It may be that written approval via email is sufficient for your company; if this is the case, keep it as simple and easy as possible.
On the other hand, publishing a customer testimonial without written approval puts you and your company at risk for damaging customer relationships or even legal recourse. I once worked with a woman who was almost fired for using a customer video outside the originally agreed-upon use.
In the last post, I talked about keeping the format of the deliverable loose. While you may have pictured your customer testimonial as a written success story you can give your salespeople, your customer might be cagey about putting details in writing and, as a result, lose his nerve and back out just before you hit ‘publish’ to your website. BUT, does he know there are other options to tell his story and speak on your behalf, such as at an industry event or in a short video? Knowing there are alternatives eases the pressure and increases the likelihood of your customer story ever seeing the light of day.
Want More? Check out our other posts for more insights on B2B marketing that works. Or, learn more about what we do at Queen Palm Media and three common B2B marketing challenges we solve for our clients.
Ready to talk? Get in touch with us to discuss how you can best leverage your customer stories.
