Episode 15: Pocket Stories for Sales
Sales Enablement Tactics
Welcome to the next episode of The CMA Newsletter where 450 marketers get better at building Customer Marketing programs and strengthening relationships with their customers in less than 5 minutes.
So you’re a Customer Marketer running an Advocacy program. You have access to all of your platform promoters. You get to hear about their awesome usage, the innovative ways they are using features, AND you get to hear their results.
You try HARD to get the case study but it’s taking months. All the while, your Sales team, in most cases, are at home, alone, trying to sell their little hearts out.
I believe the best Sales people are story tellers (combined with a killer solutions architect that knows their shit and can answer any technical question on the fly).
At the beginning of 2022, I decided to help enable the sales team to be better story tellers. I do that in 3 ways.
Pocket Stories
Dedicated meetings with Sales
SFDC Reports
Today, I will break down these 3 sales enablement tactics that has me known as “pivotal for pipeline progression and revenue”.
Leslie not only goes the extra mile for customers, she does the exact same internally. Our AE team always appreciates her creative events, proactive help, fast responses, and story telling which has been pivotal for pipeline progression and revenue.
-Ben Haber, Sales Manager at Sendoso
Pocket Stories
Pocket Stories are customer stories that I have in my “back pocket” to use (as needed) as social proof/validation in front of other prospects/customers. These stories are easy to remember and can be told in less than a minute.
Just because something is not a full blown approved case study, doesn’t mean you can’t share that with your sales team.
** Lessoned Learned”** - My whole career I protected the customer and their story. Which I still do but I believe I went to the extreme. I didn’t share a GOD DAMN thing with the sales team until it was approved and on the website.
I’m not saying that you should create slides and a talk track for unpublished case studies but you can educate Sales on how a customer in “X industry” is using your platform. Point being, you can tell a great story without the company name.
Also, when you are speaking to a customer with an interesting use case, simply ask them if you can share it with the sales team to help them bring the platform to life with real life examples. No slides, no names, just the story and if it has results. You’ll be surprised how maybe people are okay with it if positioned right.
**Sorry to break it to you but you are a Sales person as well!**
Here is how to get started:
Create a slack channel
Here is your template for posting:
Company: Big Data Public Company
Industry: Information Technology & Services, SaaS, B2B
Segment: Enterprise
Use Case: Deal Acceleration
Story: X
Results: X
Next, create a Google doc to pin to the channel reiterating how to use the channel. Copy this 👇
Pocket Stories for Sales
How to use:
Customer Marketing will be updating the slack channel as new customer stories come in. The purpose of this channel is to teach YOU how our customers are using the platform. This channel will get full very quickly so I’d recommend scanning through each day and absorbing the story.
When it comes time to rattle off a specific use case to your prospect, the search functionality will come in handy.
How NOT to use:
Downloading pictures and putting the content in your own deck
Sharing your screen and scrolling through the channel with your prospects
Creating any customer facing assets with these stories.
PMM will be taking these stories and creating slides for your first call deck if approved by the customer!
Any questions you can ask Leslie.
Thanks all!
Get on an all-hands or Sales meeting and announce the initiative. Everyone loves customer wins. They will naturally associate you with great news.
Story Time w/ Leslie (Sales meeting)
In order to bring these stories to life and to make sure they actually see them (slack can get noisy), I meet with the Sales team every other Tuesday for Story Time. 🤣
On this call we discuss the pocket stories, new case studies in draft, wins from my advocates (I have asked them if I could share with the sales team) and new hot references. They get really excited for new References!
SFDC Reports
Now that you have armed them with stories, I think it’s as equally important that they know a list of current customers and if they can reference them quickly.
Has a Sales person ever slacked you “Hey, do we have a ENT company, in X industry on the east coast with blue eyes?” Okay maybe not the blue eyes part but I don’t have time for slacks like that. So I created this amazing report in SFDC. It’s called Customers with logo permission by Sub Industry
My vision for Sales is that when a prospect asks “Do you have any other customers in the X industry? If so who?”, then they will be able to rattle off customers in the same industry.
With this report, now they when asked “Do you have any customers in the legal Software industry, Sales can confidently say, “Yes, Zapproved and SurePoint Technologies”
**We use Clearbit & ZoomInfo to get the sub-industry. Maybe ask your marketing team if they use these.
It is extremely helpful and saves me a ton of time.
You’re probably thinking “Thanks Leslie, we don’t have the data on logo permission.”
Well lessoned learned from doing this for 6 years —> Work with Sales ops to automate this info from the sales contract into Salesforce. Field is “Logo Permission” with a pick list of Yes, No, or Prior Approval Needed. Make the fields required in order to close the opportunity.
Another report I created was Case Study by Sub-Industry.
It’s not easy to sift through a bunch of case studies on the website. So this report helps Sales tell a story by Industry. For Example, “Oh yes, Arctic Wolf is in the Security space and uses us to drive pipeline and accelerate deals.
Hope this was helpful. Now resist the urge to open your computer and start building reports. Have a nice looooong weekend and I’ll see you in 2 weeks. ✌️
Love your CMA Soulmate,
Leslie
I will be on vacation next weekend so you won’t hear from me. We are off to Tahoe for my husbands 25th birthday. Oh I mean 40th birthday 😳 aaaaand I will follow shortly behind him in October. 😭😭😭
Happy, happy Birthday!