Customer storytelling is the vendor sales lifeblood - we've told 648 stories and want more
- Summary:
- Story telling is the lifeblood of winning the customer. We've analyzed how we perform in exposing and engaging with those stories. The results are compelling.
I'd like to think we can go better and achieve 15% of all stories as customer stories.
That means we need an additional 189 as of today plus about 4 or 5 per week thereafter.
Why am I making a big deal about this?
We're coming into the conference silly season and you'll already have seen Brian Sommer and Jon Reed's conference keynote survival guide. In it they say to vendors:
- Get your customers on stage. We’re a lot more interested in what your customers are doing than what’s in your innovation lab. Oh, and avoid the sanitized, over-moderated and way-over-rehearsed “customer panel” (yawn). Consider letting the customers ask YOU questions – unscripted moments add up to better keynote sessions.
For us, the prime requirement is that the customer story should be interesting and easily digestible, preferably with figures to back up the shared outcome. It helps if the story teller can describe the journey they embarked upon and the lessons they are willing to share with the roughly 100-130,000 people who turn up and read diginomica every month.
Everything else is up for grabs.
As a second bit of analysis, I ran a routine to discover which have been our most popular stories over the last year as indicated by the amount of engagement among the social platforms to which we actively distribute. Check this:
Those are the top two of ALL stories measured this way. Notice how LinkedIn dominates the engagement metric? That's because we're in the B2B market and that's where business folk hang out.
If I change the time parameter to 6 months then the ING story remains at the top of the pile but this story: Kone expects a lift from new field services applications, slots into the number 3 spot. The point being that customer stories have a very long 'shelf' life. They may not necessarily hit the dramatic highs that a blockbuster vendor story achieves but they pack a long term punch.
We say the same thing about customer stories in every partner engagement : let us talk to your customers and write them up the way they happened because we understand how customers buy from customers. Success requires that the customer voice is maintained in the way in which it was originally voiced. We're good at ensuring that happens.
And before the PRs and marketers worry about messaging, consider this graphic from none other than Gartner:
What are you waiting for? The diginomica platform is open to anyone who wants to tell their story.