Hi! This year I cranked out the customer success stories / evidence pieces, but as a team of one, quickly realized that sales and CSM teams were not fully aware of these new assets. I have worked with their leaders, the enablement team, and even went on a “road show” to multiple team and all hand calls show what I’ve been up to and where to find these resources. While everyone says these are invaluable and they are using them in their pitch decks, the metrics say otherwise. Unfortunately, we don’t have the best tracking system through Showpad and Templafy. Anyone have strategies that have improved the utilization of customer evidence stories/ proof points/ etc. and / or tracking these metrics?
I’m also hoping to find a better way to track my timelines for customer stories and where I’m at with them. Right now I’m using my own excel template, which makes sense to me, but I haven’t had time to explore best ways to organize it so it makes sense to leadership. Any tips there are appreciated!
Thanks!!
I’m struggling with this, too! I was asked to do an audit and there’s so little info about how the teams are using them.
That's a tough one and I have the same challenge. We make sure to create one page summary slides of every long form case study for easy insertion into a pitch deck. Sounds like you have that too. We promote new stories in several of our internal Slack channels including Sales, Customer Success, Marketing. Our industry teams are also informed. The assets will soon be available in our sales enablement tool Mindtickle. Maybe there will be some usage metrics in Mindtickle. Otherwise, I have no way of knowing how often these assets are getting used. We used to have our customer story assets in ReferenceEdge (SFDC app) and sellers could send them to prospects directly from that tool, but it wasn't getting used either.
I promote in similar spaces (Slack), Shelly. But we don't have these tools that either of y'all have.
The thing you need to figure out is where are sales and CSMs most of the time? Salesforce, or some other tool? Then, once you know that, you need to figure out how to get your stuff in there in a place where they would naturally look. I'm working on trying to take it to the next step by proactively serving up content based on their open opportunities or upcoming check-in calls.
Getting ready to explore using AI to help sales find relevant case studies when they need them.
I would have thought that SFDC would be the place, with ReferenceEdge serving as our customer story content library within SFDC opportunities. But it wasn't used much at all.
do you know why? What I like to do is just set up calls with reps and ask them a bunch of discovery questions about what they know about finding and using customer evidence, what they don't know but wish they did, what's stopping them from using the current system, etc.
it was a somewhat cumbersome process in RefEdge. Also, we had/still have a custom built tool for other types of sales enablement / competitive assets and the reps would have to go to two different places for customer assets vs. those things. So we've moved all of our customer story assets into that tool now and got rid of RefEdge. I am looking into Laudable for Gong as another way to get more customer proof points/testimonials from call recordings.
thanks for chiming in! Sounds like we have similar processes. I'm really curious how you show your value to your leaders and what are your KPI's look like with limited ability to track. I just started in this role 6 months ago, and we started with sharing how many assets (stories captured, stories approved/waiver signed, story slides, case studies, etc completed) but now my leaders want more of the "so what" and proof that they are being used to close deals. We used to have a feedback loop in place and a survey each quarter, but apparently participation was close to 0. Maybe I will try to bring that back to see if I can revive it...
Our sales team uses Seismic so we put the stories in there for them, but even then not all of them send from Seismic the way they should. However, that’s an issue much larger than customer stories.
From a process tracking standpoint, we use Asana and have a project set up specifically for customer story management.
Hi , I find Trello boards a simple way to track where case studies/projects are. I create a board with columns (lists) such as Collecting Background, Ready to Interview, Interview Complete, Drafting, Internal Review, Customer Review, etc. I think I'm even using the free version. It's been very simple to use.
