There can be no business without customers, and optimizing and retaining clients is crucial to customer success. Therefore, it is essential to build upon established relationships, and provide value to the customer. To stay competitive, simply acquiring customers is not the answer; you need long-term retention and repeat value.

Customer success is about creating solutions to potential problems of customers. It is essential to understand the customer’s needs, and have a thorough knowledge of the product backed by excellent people skills. These will help you guide a customer towards success.

Every customer that shares their positive experience as a testimonial is a success story. The next step is to share such stories with potential customers, as well as your team. Let’s understand why this is important.

Increase Sales

Customer success stories can nicely complement an advertising campaign. These stories are effective, because they feature real people with real issues and solutions.

The impact of a customer success story is much greater, as the people who are the lead characters in these stories are reliable reference points to potential clients, giving first-hand feedback. The results are instant as new customers can see the benefits of your products or services.

Take a look at some of the customer success stories about Commercient SYNC, the #1 data integration platform for sales. Each one tells a story about a customer’s need or issue, and how Commercient helped solve it by integrating their ERP and CRM. Click this video to watch how SYNC works.

Helps with Enhancement of a Product or Service

Customer success stories shared with Marketing or Sales can also help with enhancing the product or service that may have an issue or problem. The solutions can become part of the development or upgrading of the product or service.

Other team members of your business can benefit from such updated services and products, and saving time and effort. They also enhance the reputation of the provider.

Customers also save time on the lengthy process of making reference calls, looking for testimonials, reviews and other information through various sources.

Helpful with Marketing Campaigns

Sales and Marketing perform the all-important role of generating new leads, converting those leads, and retaining customers with strategies and support. Customer success stories, such as testimonials, case studies, and quotes, are interconnected with an effective marketing or sales strategy. They are excellent for adding to your marketing strategies.

Using more of these success stories within Marketing and Sales is certain to give you a competitive advantage. These stories can support your overall Sales and Marketing process as they provide positive feedback for your business.

Identify Common Problems

If you have clients across different industries with issues that you helped solve, and are typical to each industry, you must create individual success stories that address that particular business. These are great stories to share with prospective clients in the same industry.

Use your website or blog to talk about these common issues, and how you addressed them with your solutions. It’s always better to have a story with a focus on the buyer’s problems and how they were solved, and not just your product or brand.

Create Trust and Credibility

With so many companies out there offering similar products and services, what can you do to put you ahead in the race? Surveys suggest sharing customer success stories are a great way for businesses to prove their competitive edge to prospective buyers, and gain trust.

It is also prudent that you share your case studies and success stories as early as possible to effectively explain the benefits of your product over others. When you share your stories, you also reassure a prospective buyer of your knowledge and credibility in the industry.

By working through real client issues and then sharing these, you gain insightful knowledge and expertise which your competitors may be struggling with. These solutions are also the recipe for some great content which your team can use and share online and at events or conferences, and during potential interviews with the media.

Stories are Likely to be Retained

Who doesn’t like to weave stories? And who doesn’t like listening to a story? Data and stats are boring, whereas stories are interesting. People are much more likely to remember a good story than numbers.

The solutions are an intrinsic part of the story, and are much easier to visualize and keep the customers engaged. Just like with everything else, personalizing the story to match a prospective client’s needs is even more effective.

Incorporating stories into the sales process is most likely to win you the deal with the customer who is also free to add his own stories for the benefit of both them.

Commercient is a reliable name in the field of data integration for sales; our SYNC platform actively integrates ERP and CRM systems. Commercient has successfully worked with clients from a multitude of industries, and has happy customers whose businesses have been transformed.

We are proud to be associated with our clients and been a part of their success stories with our efforts. To read our customer success stories, please click here.

If you’d like to learn more about Commercient SYNC, please contact us today!

About the Author

Raj Adhi is a professional writer, editor and blogger. She has completed her Graduation in Chemistry and Masters in Journalism from University of Mumbai.