Practical Voice of Customer Use Case - PDF Content

Jeff Yeger

Disclaimer;
I work for IT Central Station, the leading user reviews site for enterprise tech. My bread and butter is VoC content.
With that said I will never pitch you, leave a link that takes you to our website, or recommend you use our site or services in any way. My goal is to share my experience in the hopes that others find it useful.

Now, to the point:

Buyers don't believe anything you have to say.

It's a shame really, because your product is awesome. It can save people tons of money, is a pleasure to use, and comes with an amazing customer success team to boot. 

But there is a more reliable source of information about your product than you and your marketing teams - your customers.

Buyers want to hear what real users have to say about your product. The people who took the plunge, spent the money, and are either seeing results or are getting ready to find another solution. 

They trust those people much more than you. 

Companies have come to notice this shift in the way people buy, and have made amazing strides in putting the voice of the customer at the forefront. Everyone has case studies now, everyone collects customer advocates. It's the reason I can choose 'VoC' as an option for this thread in the first place. 

With that said there are huge gaps in the sales cycle that voice of customer content should be filling, and I'd like to help fill some of them for you. 

The logic is sound - if the information that buyers believe and want to read comes directly from my customers, then I should be using that customer voice in all aspects of the sales cycle. 

Specifically, let's talk about white papers/Ebooks.

We've spent forever designing them, organizing them. They're immaculate, and paint a perfect picture of our product.

They're also inherently biased and impossible for me to trust as a buyer. 

Your brand is all over that content, and you're a vendor trying to sell a product. Prospects don't believe all the claims you make - not without proof. 

So why not include social proof in your PDF sales materials. You already have your case studies, so why not put them in the places where buyers are looking?

In the spirit of things, I'm going to let my customer do the talking for me.

Attached to this post is an Ebook produced by a customer.

On every page where they make claims about their product, they use customer quotes to drive the point home, and prove that real people are seeing real results from their product in the real world.

This is their top performing PDF piece - it was not until they added the voice of customer bits.

Take advantage of the most influential voice in sales, and watch it transform how your buyers interact with you.

Please feel free to ask any questions or offer your own wisdom on the topic. If this is helpful to anyone I would love to share more examples that have been proven to work. 

Cheers!
Jeff