Hey sales leaders: Do you struggle to get customer win stories in the hands of your reps? Try this.
Reps love having stories they can tell about how your company helped Customer X to A, B, and C. These stories are powerful proof points for prospective customers that you can do what you say you can do.
To clarify: I’m not talking about legally approved & published case studies from the marketing team. I’m talking about a paragraph or so of a talk track that reps can incorporate into conversations. Internal only, no customer-facing collateral. And as long as you anonymize the customer name, legal doesn’t need to get involved.
These little nuggets are gold.
But once you have more than a handful of reps, it starts to become very difficult to collect, document, and distribute those stories in a scalable way.
Need evidence of how difficult it is?
Look at your Competition channel in Slack, and count the number of times you see, “Hey do we have any customer stories from a financial services account in France where we won against competitor ACME, and they’re using our newest AI feature?”
Here’s an idea to create a scalable way of collecting lots of win stories and making them easily accessible & filterable.
Short version: Require that stories be collected in Salesforce/Hubspot when opportunities are Closed/Won.
Longer version:
–Decide on some minimum thresholds for the kinds of deals for which stories would be required — e.g., minimum ARR, minimum sales cycle length, only certain opportunity types, etc.
–Create automation in the CRM to ensure that in order to Close/Won an opp, you have to verify the accuracy of certain fields on the opp — like competitor, use case, etc. This is important because once this is implemented, reps are gonna need to filter the stories using these fields.
–Here’s the tricky part. Don’t require the rep to create the story right then and there — if it’s 11:30pm at the end of the quarter, you’re gonna have some pissed off reps. INSTEAD, make the story submission a requirement before reps can paid commission on the deal.
–After the opp is Closed/Won and before they get paid, they’re required to go back to the opportunity and fill out two fields: one with open text to write a paragraph about the deal, and one where they’re asked to record a 30-second video telling the story. Make sure to provide a framework for this — like “Answer these 3 questions”.
–Create a default report or dashboard that is filterable by reps — industry = financial services; region = France; competitor = ACME; capability = newest AI feature.
Happy selling.