the kind of customer testimonials that really work
With COVID-19 making its way across the world, many employees have been recommended to work remotely until the risk of exposure lessens. Maybe you already work remotely and this won’t have a big impact on your routine, but if you’re settling into a home office for the first time, these tips might make you more successful. Maintaining your morning routine (and not just staying in your PJs) makes a world of difference, and video calls help you feel engaged with the team (yet another reason to ditch the PJs).
📸 When you hear the term “influencer marketing”, models selling clothing on Instagram probably comes to mind. But there’s a growing number of B2B SaaS businesses getting into the influencer game, and it’s not on the gram. LinkedIn is the prime spot for B2B influencer marketing because of its business professional demographic. Unlike Instagram, there aren’t any 3rd party tools that integrate of LinkedIn which can help identify the best influencers for you (yet). For now, we suggest using their advanced search to see who talks about keywords relevant to your business. You can then reach out via LinkedIn by connecting with them and adding a personal note. If that doesn’t work, Hunter.io is a great product for finding people’s work emails.
📹 We’d venture to say that almost every B2B SaaS product has testimonials on their website somewhere, but they’re largely ignored. It’s probably because brief customer quotes all look the same, and just aren’t detailed enough to make an impact on a visitor. White papers are a step in the right direction, but they can be too time consuming and aren’t incredibly engaging either. Video testimonials give you the best of both worlds – quickly dive into a real use case while holding the visitors’ attention by showing real people. The only way to get video testimonials is to ask, and these strategies will help get your customers on board. You want to make things easy for your client, so an event where they can easily step aside for a quick film session is perfect.
🔨 Marketplaces can be a great source for leads, but you never want to be too reliant on them due to their inherent platform risk. A quick change of their algorithm, TOS, or really any policy could wreck your business, and they won’t be asking for your input. Much like SEM, you’ll also always be displayed next to your closest competitors, making it more difficult to get the sale. If your platform currently relies a bit too much on a marketplace platform, consider setting aside a small amount of time every week to focus on building relationships with customers outside of your platform relationship. The bottom line is they can be great when they provide easy leads, just make sure they don’t provide all of them!
🗓️ Every sales reps’ goal is to get demos on their calendar so they can flaunt the product and close deals. If your sales reps know what they’re doing, getting people to actually book the demos will be the hardest part of the process, so why not make life easy and bring the demo to them? You can do this by sharing recorded bits of the demo, just be sure to keep your videos brief by only focusing on one or two features at a time. If they’re real buyers, this will leave room for follow up questions and hopefully encourage them to book the real deal for themselves! And at the end of your recording, don’t forget to include a CTA (likely a link to your demo scheduler or other helpful resources).
⚾ We often hear all the great stories of experiments which had positive results – companies forget that in order to attain those wins, they need to actually try new things and be open to failing! In Experimentation Works, Stefan Thomke discusses the importance of encouraging a culture of experimentation. Experimentation isn’t something you try every time once in a blue moon, or reserve to a select few employees like upper management. Rather, it must become a normal activity across your entire employee base. This will require you to grant employees autonomy to test new ideas, even if it’s not a certainty they will yield positive results each time. But biting the bullet and accepting some missed swings is the only way you’ll ever hit a home run.