"I want to shout about you from the rooftop"

Jeff Breunsbach

Dramatic title - but don't we all want to talk about the great things our customers are doing?

We're in the midst of evaluating our processes between marketing and customer success. We've got enough roles to make this happen but we're finding a balance around what the process should be and who should be doing what.

In particular, how we uncover customer stories - this could mean a full-blown case study but also could mean small wins that we shout out via social.

• So, how do you "find" these stories to begin with? Who's involved and what's the process?
• Once you find the story, who's on the hook for turning it into content and shipping it out the door? What's the process?

Tagging a few folks to get the conversation started:

@Anna Alley @Bora Lee @Haley Lundgren @Jeffrey Kushmerek @Marc Phillips

Bora Lee

I think the start of this for me is - is there a distinction between product marketing (sales oriented) and customer marketing? These have different focuses so it is important that marketing is providing the right content to the right people.

To find stories, you have to go where the action is - your CS team! You should have a process in place that allows you to identify a customer success or challenge, provide a concise summary, and that allows you to confirm if the customer would be ok if their story was shared with the public. When a CSM gets off a call and has a success or challenge, this should be logged immediately. This is generally done in a Customer Success platform, but can just as easily be done in a CRM. With the fields you require, you should be able to filter on successes, customer sharing preferences, and recency of the success or challenge. You may even want to add a field that identifies the area of the success or challenge so you can narrow in on specific topics.

Your customer marketing team should be able to take it from there and set up time for an interview or provide a questionnaire to fill out that will be the basis of the customer marketing content.

Anna Alley

Definitely agree that Customer Success teams are vital to proactively identifying opportunities and customers that are great candidates for marketing to then run with. I do think marketing should be responsible for packaging and producing the content (unless you have a team specifically focused on this that sits elsewhere).

However, I think Customer Support and Onboarding can be just as beneficial. Did a customer just wrap up a wonderful support experience - ask them if they want to provide a testimonial. Is there a process of following up with customers that give high CSAT scores to further foster that positive interaction and build a partnership (especially for customers that might be in the tech touch CS model).

With Onboarding, it's often a great time to ask a customer for a testimonial right after they've gone live and are most excited by the new benefit they're getting from your product/services. They might not be able to speak to ALL the benefits, but they can speak to the amazing Onboarding experience they just had, immediate time to value, etc.

I think it's important to encourage identifying customer advocates and opportunities for testimonials across all customer facing teams. Have some sort of standard submission process when those are identified that then feeds to marketing for additional follow up, packaging, etc. It's also a great way to share VOC and acknowledgement internally across the business when a team or teammate goes above and beyond to create a fantastic customer experience. The more you can use one process to generate multiple purposes and benefits, the better!

Chad Horenfeldt

A few possibilities:
-Slack channel that allows CS to post interesting and unique client stories [it's recommended to start this with an incentive]
-Weekly retros in Slack where team members highlight interesting client stories
-Internal QBRs where a client story is featured
-Company town hall customer story feature
-Joining sales team meetings and discussing a client story
-Having a customer join a kick-off
-Diving into Gong calls to find them and then taking snippets.
-Asking clients for stories via customer marketing efforts

Sruthi Ramachandran

I agree with Bora and Chad we have something similar set up.

This topic was a major initiative for us last quarter. To get this process kick started, we initiated adding a spiff program for Customer Advocacy - G2 reviews, case studies, testimonials, quick win stories, we had a target of 3 such wins. Team was required to log them on Churn Zero (CZ).

How did the win stories come about? These stories started surfacing during QBR’s/Success planning session where CS folks asked customers about one win from their side using our platform. It could be hitting a metric or a mention of the impact while changing their process. Account team takes note of this quick win and logs the win on CZ for Sales and CS to refer the stories and make use of (not publish publicly) in their individual prospect or customer conversations.

What follows next?
1. Customer marketing teams pull a report of such win stories from CZ, reaches out to the account team (CS, Sales) for that customer and requests them to ask customer for permission to publish the story in the form of a case study.

2. CS/Sales intros customer marketing team to the customer, they take over following up with customer on our intention, what we heard during the QBR/Success plan, and if customer is willing to publish this story in the form of a case study. When Customer marketing is introduced, they share a draft of the story they intend to publish to the customer based on the win story they have seen in CZ. Multiple follow throughs and versions of the win story later, we get approvals to publish the case study.

3. Last resort if all the follows ups dont work out and case study gets stuck in approvals -  we nudge the Customer leaders to come on a Webinar or Linkedin live session with us initiated by customer marketing or demand gen teams from marketing. Their talk during the session gets translated into a case study (customer cant refuse us publishing the story once it's out in public)

All in all - it's a tedious and sometimes slow process that needs a lot of push and pull with customer marketing teams to make it happen.