Customer Success Drives Market Share
The best way to convince your prospects to buy your product or service is by causing them to identify with your existing happy customers and to feel confident that they will be equally satisfied.
This precept is even more relevant in today’s marketing environment, in which prospects are put off by a hard-sell approach. In an environment of interactive media, on-line communities and open access, the most successful marketing initiatives enable maximal interaction between prospects and real-live human customers, hearing what they both like and don’t like about your products and services in a genuine and authentic way. Such initiatives require that the marketing team develop and maintain extensive, long-term programs that give incentives to as many customers as possible to participate in these initiatives. For this to work, the marketing engine must be in place to efficiently record and publish your happy customers’ testimonials in ways that are creative and interesting while capturing your product’s key values. Even more important, the testimonials must be shared in a way that enables prospects to not only learn from and identify with the customers’ published content, yet also lets them have effective access to these customers in order to add the most critical element – credibility and trust.
Of course in an environment that involves open two-way communication between customers and prospects, your marketing and sales teams must be involved in every interaction, aware of what is going on and prepared to intervene and proactively respond to any activities that might have negative influence on the sales efforts.
Fellow marketers, what strategies and applications do you consider most effective for planning and managing your customer referencing programs? Which incentives do you use to encourage your customers from one end and your sales reps from the other to actively participate?
