We know high-quality customer stories—filled with data and qualitative evidence—make a world of difference in building trust with prospects, moving leads through the funnel, and inspiring customers to expand their usage of your products. And yet, limited resources mean many marketing teams can’t create the customer stories they need to keep up in intensely competitive environments.
We recently spoke with BMC’s Kellyann Lanspa, Principal, Solutions Marketing for the Remedyforce product line, to understand how her team leverages the voice of their customers to stand out in a highly competitive market—and why they ultimately selected TechValidate to create social proof at scale.
The growing need for more customer stories
The marketing team at BMC Remedyforce—a mid-market solution for IT service management—faced challenges that are common at B2B marketing organizations. With a limited budget, the team needed evidence to support their marketing claims, establish trust with prospects, and compete with some big players in the industry. To accomplish all of this, they knew they needed to get their hands on more social proof.
That’s the moment they turned to TechValidate by SurveyMonkey, a software solution that transforms customer feedback into published marketing assets automatically. Within weeks of launching their initial outreach with TechValidate, BMC was able to publish dozens of verified case studies, testimonials, reviews, and customer statistics from the customer feedback. The published customer proof points are now used across marketing campaigns and in sales conversations to shore up their claims.
The BMC marketing team had several goals in mind for their TechValidate content:
- Highlight top use cases, results and benefits
- Drive awareness at the top of the funnel
- Create demand gen assets to gather more leads
- Support the sales team with compelling proof points and customer stories
- Get more social media content to keep the conversation going with prospects and customers
Tapping into a broader base of customer advocates to share untold stories and highlight top results
BMC has a customer reference team charged with creating in-depth, one-to-one customer stories with big logos. But it was hard to aggregate data from these initiatives to share the bigger picture. TechValidate was the ideal complement to their current customer advocacy efforts, providing fast access to a larger pool of happy customers and the ability to highlight top results and benefits across their customer base.
Using simple, customizable questionnaires sent through TechValidate, BMC is able to gather hundreds of customer quotes and data that span the customer’s journey with the product—from initial challenges through deploying the solution and seeing real measurable results.
Plus, TechValidate’s 3rd-party validation enables BMC to publish stories from unnamed customers—stories that are often highly relevant and compelling, but previously went untold because anonymous case studies lack credibility. “We do run into customers that can’t endorse vendors. In the past, even if they had a great story, we didn’t get to tell it,” says Lanspa. “Instead of not writing the story at all, TechValidate gives unnamed customer stories an air of authority. TechValidate allows me to tell those stories.”
Enabling the sales team to have more meaningful, targeted conversations
To build trust and keep prospects engaged throughout the sales funnel, sales people commonly send case studies, testimonials, and statistics detailing the results their customers are seeing. Beyond staying top-of-mind with potential customers with this customer evidence, the Remedyforce sales team looks to this feedback to help guide their conversations.
By studying customer-reported concerns, challenges, and use cases, the sales team discovered some common trends in each industry. For instance, large banks were highly concerned with security, while educational institutes were looking for out-of-the-box functionality. Based on these findings, sales knew what key features to highlight with different prospects, resulting in more targeted and effective conversations.
Using TechValidate’s content filters, sales people search customer proof points by job title, industry, and company size, as well as custom tags, so it’s easy to find a relevant quote or statistic to reference in any sales call or email.
The benefits of proof points segmented by vertical, company size, and persona stretch beyond the sales team, as Lanspa notes: “It’s so intuitive and easy to just pop back into the data and look for a specific quote, chart, or graphic that I want to highlight in a sales training, include in a marketing asset, or post to social.”
Using customer stories to drive awareness, boost demand gen, and improve engagement on social
BMC Remedyforce uses TechValidate content for a host of marketing campaigns, including a “don’t take our word for it” eBook that’s included in their new buyer’s toolkit, as well as demand gen assets and social posts. When Lanspa and her team are looking for quick ways to keep their followers engaged, they simply filter through the published content, pick out a nice chart or testimonial, and schedule the post.
Having access to a host of published content makes it easy to drive awareness and generate interest at the top of the funnel, while also freeing up valuable resources so Lanspa and team can focus on other marketing tasks.
BMC also looks to the data collected with TechValidate to get a pulse on big trends within their customer base and a better view of the average customer’s experience. “We now have the breadth of data we need to track broader customer trends as well as back up our key competitive claims,” says Lanspa. “For example, we can now say with confidence that most customers are able to install our product and start realizing value in 30 days or less—and it’s validated by a 3rd party.”
Social proof at scale
Driving awareness, establishing trust, and keeping prospects engaged are big tasks for any marketing team, particularly when the resources available don’t match the scale of content needed to meet these goals. BMC solved this challenge by using TechValidate to create hundreds of case studies, testimonials, and stats that they use to boost marketing campaigns and improve sales conversations.
Want to see how TechValidate can help you generate more social proof fast? Request a demo here >>
