In growing B2B SaaS companies, it’s fundamental to highlight your customers’ successes and how your product has helped them overcome obstacles and common issues within their organisations.
Your customers deal with different pain points and challenges. It’s important to build a diverse story pipeline that showcases their unique stories.
What is a customer story pipeline?
A customer story pipeline contains the most captivating customer success stories which can turn any lead into a customer. Having a diverse story collection to choose from, simply means that there is more than one story to be told.
To get started in building your pipeline, certain things need to be considered:
- Strategic Goals & Objectives
- Aligning customer stories that will help support overarching business goals and objectives;
- Strategic goals for the company’s revenue growth and go to market plan.
- Upcoming product releases.
- Upcoming product features releases that will require customer reviews or references;
- Getting customer reviews & references from Beta customers to help build social proof and trust;
- Industry-specific needs
- Highlight stories to show how your product offering is currently being used within different industries to solve key challenges;
- Industry-specific stories that correlate to your company’s current offerings;
- Use case-specific needs
- Outline stories that give a detailed account of their understanding of the functionality of your product;
- Use case-specific that showcases the process in which the customer plans on using your product to achieve their success.
Now that you’ve identified the specific areas to focus on, you need to source for customers for your pipeline to be fulfilled. The best way to source them is through:
- PR & case study contractual agreements
- Customers who have agreed to PR and Case Study opportunities in contractual agreements;
- Collaborating with Customer-Facing Teams
- Account managers & Customer Success managers nominating customers;
- Salespeople who work alongside qualified customers;
- Customer Advocates database
- Previous engagement with customers that have completed other advocacy activities;
- Customer marketing managers in charge of the latest advocate marketing campaign;
- Product Beta Customers
- Customers who have participated as beta testers.
Conclusion
As a result, you will be prepared to face your main concerns with a strategic output before building your pipeline and have knowledge of the best ways to source for customer pipeline.
