5 Ways to Secure More Customer Stories and Testimonials
Bringing customers into your marketing is powerful. A strong testimonial establishes immediate trust. A peer recommendation can dramatically shorten the long B2B sales cycle—especially for complex products and services.
Whether it’s a brief quote or a detailed case study, the best testimonials tell stories that resonate with your audiences’ struggles, pain points, and aspirations—so they want to learn more and move to action.
Why Is It Hard to Get Customer Testimonials?
The hard part is getting customers to agree to share their stories. Every organization struggles to secure references and testimonials. Here are the kinds of things we hear from clients:
● “The sales rep says the customer has a no-endorsement policy.”
● “The client’s corporate communications shut us down.”
● “Our champion moved on to another job, so we no longer have a strong point of contact.”
● “We don’t want to bother them, because the contract is up for renewal.”
● “We have already used this person or organization too much already.”
5 Creative Ways to Secure More Customer Stories
A long-term, strategic approach together with some creative tactics can help you break through objections like these and increase your odds.
#1 Understand Their Organizations’ Goals
I’ve lost track of the number of times people have asked me to “go around” corporate communications or MarCom, saying “it will just slow us down.” Trying to circumvent the comms teams nearly always backfires and can hurt your chances of ever getting a testimonial. Your customer’s communications team can be a helpful partner, especially if you take time to build a relationship with them and consider their communications priorities.
#2 Start Small and Start Early
Rather than starting with an ask for a reference or case study, find opportunities to have no-pressure conversations before you need to make an ask. Use time at trade shows, sales dinners, road shows, and virtual meetings to get to know the players and build relationships. Listen and ask questions. Don’t push. Then follow up over LinkedIn or email, sending something you think they’ll find helpful. Once you build rapport, it’s much easier to ask for a full-blown testimonial.
#3 Befriend the Revenue Gatekeepers
Whether it’s your sales or service teams, to get to customers, you need to go through them. Invest time in getting to know the people in your organization who own client relationships and find ways to help them so they will help you. You can also coach reps on how to spot reference-ready customers and describe the opportunities you could bring to their clients. Have a particularly difficult rep? Just move on. We find they often change their tune when they see other clients getting time and attention in the spotlight.
#4 Do Some Detective Work So You Can Stop Asking for “Favors”
Present opportunities clients want to say yes to by taking a “what’s in it for me” mindset. Not only are customer testimonials forms of social proof to benefit your business, but they also provide an opportunity for the customer to promote their business and build their career. Discover what they care about, then present an opportunity they want to say “yes” to. Here are just a few examples.
Source: Quickstep Communications
The key is to present something that will help them achieve THEIR goals, as well as yours. And make it fit their time, location, role, and interests.
#5 Get Creative with Incentives for Your Customer Evangelists
Although incentives bring to mind the idea of providing people with a tangible reward (i.e. free stuff) for testimonials, we lean toward more personalized and meaningful thank yous (within their organizations’ guidelines of course). It could be a free ticket to one of your events, a casual lunch or treats delivered to the team, or extra time with one of your in-house experts that they admire. One approach that has worked well for us is to offer to make a donation to a charity of their choice as a thank you for their time.
Making these tactics part of your comms team’s regular operations will avoid last-minute fire drills and help build a bank of loyal customers you can tap for marketing. The goal is to move to more of a long game. You won’t just help your marketing efforts, you’ll also help your organization’s retention and expansion opportunities with your best customers.
Good luck!
Follow Quickstep's Gwen Gulick on LinkedIn for strategic communications and thought leadership guidance for B2B Marketers.