In this episode, I chat with Brent Keltner, CEO of Winalytics and author of “The Revenue Acceleration Playbook”, about how customer success stories and client testimonials can transform your sales process.
Testimonial marketing is a powerful tool these days, given how noisy the world is. With such an overabundance of information on social media, we as customers have become very resistant to traditional marketing techniques.
The traditional approach to marketing was very product-driven. But data shows that the old way is no longer yielding the same results that it used to. Instead, new techniques are needed that better resonate with customers.
That’s where customer success stories and client testimonials come in.
When we hear a statement, our brains are naturally wired to resist. But testimonial marketing is about getting around this impulse to resist. When you lead with stories about your peers, there's a shift from “you and me” to “we”. That change can make people more receptive.
Another benefit of this type of marketing is that it’s a great way to get referrals. When you go to your customers and have conversations with them, it can be both a learning opportunity, and an opportunity for you to find other people who you can help.
Simply ask, "Who else like you might benefit from the success we've had together?"
Incentives are no longer enough to get referrals because people are so inundated with information. By using customer success stories, however, people will be happy to spread the word about you.
Most business owners neglect testimonial marketing and stick to traditional approaches. But by sharing the past successes you’ve had through client testimonials, you can gain the trust of a whole new batch of customers.
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-------------------- ABOUT PETER BOOLKAH --------------------
Peter Boolkah (AKA The Transition Guy) is the World’s #1 Business Transition Coach whose main passion in life is to work with talented and high performing business owners who are in the process of creating exciting, high growth businesses.
Peter helps you to navigate and transition through the crucial growth pa
-------------------- ABOUT PETER BOOLKAH --------------------
Peter Boolkah (AKA The Transition Guy) is the World’s #1 Business Transition Coach whose main passion in life is to work with talented and high performing business owners who are in the process of creating exciting, high growth businesses.
Peter helps you to navigate and transition through the crucial growth pains that all growing businesses experience making it as painless and exciting as possible.
It is important to remember that businesses do not just grow and develop on their own, it is up to us and our teams to make this happen by making every day purposeful.
As businesses grow some parts of the journey will be easier than others and most owners do not have all the answers. Starting a business is one of the most exciting things we get to do and we all have aspirations of achieving great things. In fact Peter is yet to meet someone who started a business with the intention of failing.
Peter’s ultimate life goal is to inspire and empower over 100,000 Entrepreneurs to create long term thriving businesses resulting in the creation of 1,000,000 jobs.
So if you are scaling up your business, you’re in a bu...
(upbeat music)- Hi, Peter Boolkah here, and welcome to today's edition of "The Transition Guy." Now joining me today in the studio is Brent Keltner, who is CEO of Winalytics and author of "The Revenue Acceleration Playbook." Welcome, Brent.- Thank you, Peter. Really glad to be here.- No, great to have you here. And today, it would really be good to discuss, really, a slightly different approach to selling, and that's talking about customer successes. Because most people spend their time pushing their product or pushing their service, and they don't necessarily talk enough about their customer wins. Why do you believe that's crucial to success today?- Yeah. If you think about the way the human brain is wired, right, when somebody makes a statement to us, our brain is naturally wired to resist. Whereas if you lead a person, right, to their own statement, then they believe it and own it more. So you said it very well. The old world of selling is product-driven selling, and in a world that's really, really noisy, internet, social media, emails coming at people, phone, everything, we're naturally very resistive.- Right.- But when you lead with stories about how you've been more successful with peers, or questions if people are working with a problem, you spark natural interest in them."Hey, could they make me more successful?" And when you lead with stories of your peer, there's a very subtle but powerful shift that happens in the conversation from you and me, right, buyer, vendor, to we, who are peers thinking about solving a common problem.- Why do you think that is, though? Why do you think that perhaps people shy away from sharing customer successes?- I think, honestly, Peter, it's one of the things we say is,"Most of you don't know your success stories,'cause you'd never ask." Honestly, if you're an early growth company and you only have 10 customers, if you're a bigger company, you have 50, hundreds of customers, if you just go to your top two or three and you say, "I'd love to set a time to hear what's working for you," you know,"Where are you getting the most value?" And you also wanna put a question,"Is there anything we could do better?" So it's not just a celebrate, but it's a learn opportunity, and you go to that conversation, and you just ask them, "Hey, what was it like before? What's it like now?" So problem, solution, "And what results are you realizing?" And then if you're having a really good conversation, you can say, "Is there anybody like you?" You know, "Any peers that you think that have a similar problem that might be interested in having a relationship with us?" And as you talked about, in a really challenging market environment, doing more with our existing customers, which can come out of those conversations, and referral selling and getting references, two most powerful ways of breaking through in a difficult market.- I think that's one of the things that has been quite challenging is the whole referral marketplace. And perhaps that referral marketplace has changed over the years, where before, people just thought that playing the old "let's give someone an incentive to refer people in" would be enough. I'm starting to see in the marketplace that's no longer enough.- No. No, I mean, people are overwhelmed, and that's where I think this idea of stories, and look, honestly, this is where really strong teams have their customer success teams doing it, right? You have your quarterly business review, and you're already talking about the great things that are going on and how we helped you achieve more revenue or, you know. So the question, the obvious question is,"All right, who's in your peer network that might also benefit?" We encourage people to build that question into these outreach where you're doing a story, or in any customer success call, just a simple question. I ask it all the time, like,"Who else like you might benefit from the success we've had together?" And people love that. They love being able to take their, like,"Hey, I'm a leader in something, and I wanna introduce my friends to something I've done really well."- So is that actually a thing there?'Cause I mean, that's the first time I've heard that "customer success team." I've never come across that before.- Well, we work with a lot of, you know, software as a service companies, and so they almost all have customer success teams. You know, the more traditional is customer service, right? That's just answering questions. Customer success teams in any kind of renewal business, their primary job is, you know, implement, gauge customer health, renew, but then they can also look for incremental upsells, and they're always best positioned to surface expansion opportunities and hand them back to your sales team to commercialize.- And that really, probably, is applicable to most businesses out there, right?- It's absolutely applicable to most businesses, right. Even if you have a traditional customer service business, I'm thinking we did some work with a high-end, it was a landscaping service, Iron Tree Services, right? And they were 30% more, because then everybody else was going to cut down or prune trees because they had this end-to-end customer experience that was just exceptional. No hassles, tree wasn't gonna fall on your house, you weren't gonna leave stuff around. And they would train their people at the end, their customer service people at the end, to ask for that, you know,"Is anybody else in your neighborhood that might have a similar need?"- Right, that's interesting.- It's a very simple question. But if you've got a good rapport, people love to make referrals when they've had a good experience.- Huh. So a customer-- When you gamify it, it kind of commercializes it. It's like, you're trying to commercialize my relationship, so much more authentic way to do it is just say,"Hey, you've been a leader in working with our service. You've done a great job of implementing our service." Make them the hero. You know, "Is there anybody else that might benefit from having a similar experience or using a product in a similar way?"- I suppose that's more of a targeted question that makes it easier for the customer to think about instead of, "Is there anybody you know?"'Cause that seems to be the typical referral question."Is there anybody else you know that can benefit from my service?" I mean, that totally screws with their brain. That's too much a big question for most.- Yeah, yeah. And I totally agree. And I think it's better to target to whatever problem you solve.- So that's it. So, I mean, so basically, we're talking about targeting the successes of our clients and focusing on the problem that we solved with them, which isn't old stuff. Well, it isn't actually new stuff. It's quite old. It's quite the principles of marketing and selling. However, it's actually putting into the context of the framework, we'll use our customers to really showcase how we've helped them become more successful. And as you say, those stories then encourage other people to say, "Okay, maybe we want some of that success as well."- Yeah, 100%. I mean the old world is product-driven selling, and it's gotten harder, and harder, and harder. And you know the data. In the 2010s, a lot of teams doubled down, and all the sales methodologies doubled down on the sales team controlling the sale, right? Pitching the product and awful results. I mean, we went from 57% of people on quota to 43%, as vice president of sales tenure went from three years to two years, right? Product-driven selling in this information-rich environment where buyers are in charge has not worked. And the new way is really about starting with your, and even in the sales process, we talk about a success statement that your whole purpose is not to share your product, it's to figure out what problem they're working on and what would be a more successful future for them, and do they think your product is part of that more successful future, and hearing them tell you how you can make them more successful.- So here's a different question for you, because in recent times, I've been hearing a lot from people that their sale cycle has really sort of lengthened.- Yeah.- And the decision making process is a lot slower today than it ever has been, or people have experienced and have seen a noticeable slow down in the decision making process. Why would you think that possibly is?- Yeah, I think, look, I mean, we know that there are more and more buyers involved, right? The number, and I think it's Gartner that does work on this, you know, the number of buyers is now, in a typical sales process, is like eight or nine. And so it's just that that process of, you know, getting a lot of different perspectives on a problem, it's honestly that they have so much information that they spend time processing and getting a little bit overwhelmed with the information. It's one of the reasons we think about this idea of getting to a success statement in a first call, and maybe it's a couple of success statements, is it helps focus the conversation. I think what would we see is sales teams often leave way too much open-ended. You know, there's all kinds of things that we could talk about, because we have a really robust solution and there's all kinds of buyers and helping your buyer to prioritize early. So to give an example, we did work with a company called Mursion. Actually, let's take a different example. Did work with a company called Mainstay that has a conversational AI product to help with both yielding college admissions and then keeping, you know, summer melt, reducing the amount of summer melt, so keeping students engaged at scale, having a personalized conversation with every single one of them. And they started by pitching their product, and then they moved on to,"Well, there's six problems we could solve for you on campus." And then, guess what? The campus would bring in a bunch of different stakeholders and they'd have multiple demo to figure out. And what they found is what they needed to do is do a little bit on what is, you know, 10 minutes. It's like, "What are the key campus strategic initiatives that we can point at? And then let's suggest, you know, would this be most effective with yield, or with summer melt, or first year retention, or recruiting a more diverse student? Which of those problems that we've talked about today, where's the first place you'd wanna apply it?" And what they found is when they-- So you think that information overload slows down the sales process.- Information overload slows down the sales process.- Do you think we're guilty? Brent, do you think we're guilty of giving people too much information now?- 100% we are.- That we think that more is better?- 100% we are. And I think Forrester, it's either Forrester or Gartner, did a research study on this just a couple of years ago that 80% of sales teams think you have to share all your product information for the customer to make a good decision. So we just go through our checklist of our product. Information overload is a big problem, and so we need to focus on those pockets of energy. What do they need to solve now? Getting to that success statement around it, look, write down all the other ones, because that's your expansion opportunities.- All right. Yeah, I'm just wondering whether with all these tools available to us, whether it's smart links, video, and everything. If we were to put it in an old sales pack, it's probably like the size of an older encyclopedia, to be honest with you.(Brent laughing) And then we wonder why people become so overwhelmed by the amount of information they're trying to consume, which is unreasonable.- Yeah. And I love the way you said that, because the reality is they've already reviewed an encyclopedia of information on the internet and peer review sites like G2 and all these others. Like, they already know a ton about us, and we show up and give 'em another tome of information as opposed to taking that existing tome and say, "Hey, what really jumped out at you that could be helpful to you?"- So it's a simplification, really, isn't it? And I suppose we're operating on the premise that the internet and everything wasn't as prevalent as it is now, and we're still making the assumption that they haven't got the access to the information. It's like we're operating on a 20-year-old, outdated model.- We're operating on a 20-year-old, outdated model where we think our job is to provide information. And really what our job is is honestly, you have to be a consultant and a trusted advisor in every sales process, helping people focus on the one or two things that really matter.- And maybe we forget that the people that are now in part of the buying process tend to be quite young anyway. And therefore, their ability to find the information is probably far better than our ability to give them the information.- Yeah, that's a great point.- It's interesting.- It's a great point.- So if people want to connect with you, and really get deeper into this subject, and really sort of work out how they get the best out of their customer stories, how do they connect with you?- Yeah, I mean, two ways is they can just go to our, we have a book that you mentioned in the outset,"Authenticity Wins" is the book website. So if you just type into your browser,"authenticitywins.com," it'll land you right on our book website. And that connects to our main company website. You know, I'd encourage them, there's actually a sample of the first chapter of the book on the website. I would just encourage them to start reading about it, thinking about you need to shift your mindset from, "It's about me and my product," to, "It's about my buyer and the one or two problems I can solve for them." So I'd encourage them to read it. They can also just reach out to me personally at bkeltner, B-K-E-L-T-N-E-R, @winalytics, W-I-N-A-L-Y-T-I-C-S, .com. I answer emails. They could also follow me on LinkedIn. I do a lot of posting on this topic. Free advice they could get on LinkedIn.- And that is it, though, isn't it? I mean, it's making sure that you get access to the right advice, but most importantly, that you act upon it.- Yeah, act upon it, and acting upon it is key. When we think about working with teams, we build playbooks, but then people have to use the playbooks, and they have to come back, and we do team learning sessions, they have to come back and learn from their team what really worked in my story talk track and my customer success statement talk track. So you gotta build new muscles, and like in any sport, if you're gonna build new muscles, you gotta practice.- And you've probably gotta build them quite fast in this rapidly-changing environment.- Yeah, yeah. You gotta commit to continually iterating. I mean, honestly, in the old world of selling, you didn't have to be a learner. In the new world of selling, you gotta learn about your buyers every day,'cause every buyer's slightly different.- It's so true. That is so true. Well, thank you for sharing your wisdom today. I really do appreciate it, Brent.- Yeah, no, I appreciated the conversation, Peter.- If you enjoyed today's episode, please make sure that you like it, subscribe so you don't miss future episodes, and share it with others so that they can benefit. If you're looking to scale your business, head over to Boolkah.com and get in touch. And remember, failing to learn is learning to fail. And we've demonstrated that today. So please stay safe. Brent, you've been an amazing guest. Thank you so much.- Thank you, Peter.