How to Get Client Success Stories Approved

Photo by Adam Jang on Unsplash

It’s one thing to tell stories about your company’s products, solutions, or services. It’s even better when your clients tell those stories for you.

Clients success stories (and their lightweight cousins, client testimonials) are arguably the most important marketing content you can create. Surveys have shown B2B marketers consider customer testimonials and case studies to be among the most necessary and effective content types.

Most any marketing professional or salesperson can also provide anecdotal evidence of the value of having a client story to share at the right stage of the buyer's journey. A great story provides proof. It's one thing to say, “we can do that.” But to be able to provide a documented, real-world example of how you’ve actually done it? That's pure gold!

Of course, while the value of client stories—whether they are written stories, videos, or recorded webinars—on your website or in your salespeople’s quiver of sales enablement tools, is well established, actually capturing these stories can prove challenging.

This is especially true today, when more companies are hesitant to provide endorsements for vendors. This hesitancy extends to “implied endorsements” in the form of success stories on your website or in your company publications.

But even as the rules have changed, client success stories can still be had if you are willing to put in the work, wait out a client organization’s often-lengthy internal review and approval process, and remain responsive to the client’s needs and requests.

Here are three things to keep in mind that can help you get more client stories approved.

1. It's the client's story. Not yours.

What's better than a story you can publish on your website about a client that had a serious business problem, purchased and implemented your solution, and saw the problem disappear? And it's a home run if the story includes one or more glowing quotes from the client singing the praises of your organization and your offerings. “We wouldn't still be in business if we hadn’t worked with [insert name of your organization here].”

This sounds great, and sometimes it’s possible to produce, and even obtain approval on, stories like these. But more often than not, things don’t work out that way. There are three reasons why:

1. the story’s rarely ever that simple and straightforward

2. there are other factors (maybe even, heaven forbid, other vendors) that contributed to the positive results the client realized, and

3. those involved in approving the story may be hesitant to assign too much credit to an outside vendor.

Rather than try to paper over the extraneous factors and contributions of others that helped drive success, it’s better to accept and capture the story that's actually there to tell.

In other words, tell the client’s story, not yours.

This might seem counterintuitive. After all, your goal is to get the client to speak on record about your great organization, amazing solutions, and knowledgeable and responsive people.

But let’s face facts: business needs are more complex than ever, and complex business problems require cross-functional teams of people working on them and employing multiple solutions. This means your product or service is more likely to be part of the solution than the entire solution. Therefore, it’s pretty unlikely you're going to be able to, in good faith, capture a story where your organization saved the day.

For example, let’s say you sell an inventory management software package that a client buys as part of a larger effort to improve efficiency and rein in costs. As improved efficiency and cost containment were strategic initiatives for the client, the effort to address them may have involved making changes to procurement policies, implementing new inventory storage practices, upskilling warehouse staff, and incorporating goals associated with improved efficiency and cost containment into the organization’s performance management process and its compensation structure. The payoff for all of this work was that, two years after the client began using your software, improved efficiency had been achieved and the organization boasted a 47 percent decline in inventory-related costs.

Seeing a great marketing opportunity, you might be tempted to try to tell a story about how, by using your software, the client achieved these eye-popping results. But that wouldn't be totally accurate, would it?

Instead, the best way to tell this story is to tell the whole story, which is to say that you should tell the client's story, not the one you want to tell about your software. (If you are telling the story in brief or in summary form, at the very least make sure you describe your organization's contributions in the proper context.)

Also, even if working with your organization really was the reason the client realized great results, you need to make the client—not your organization—the hero. More specifically, you need to make sure your key contact—or their boss or some other stakeholder they would like to shine a light on—is the hero.

2. A story can have value to the client, too.

You want to publish a success story about your work with a client because you need to be able to show proof of what your organization and its solutions can do. But what about your key contacts within the client organization? They might have needs, too, and the story you publish could help address them.

Most of my career I’ve worked in the HR space, a function populated by many smart, talented people who want to make a difference for their organization and its people. Unfortunately, HR is typically viewed as a cost center as opposed to a strategic investment That means HR professionals operate in an environment where their budgets are always vulnerable to cuts. They’re also under ever-increasing pressure to show that their programs generate returns. And they personally don't get a lot of recognition.

This being their reality, when we approached them to ask to tell a story about them and their hard work, they tended to be very appreciative. I’ve had clients use the stories I wrote about them in their own internal newsletters, and one used the story as a piece of collateral to support their on-campus recruiting efforts to show the organization cares about developing its people.

It's one thing to say, “we can do that.” But to be able to provide a documented, real-world example of how you’ve actually done it? That's pure gold!

Another key contact made an appointment with his CEO to share the story and make the senior leadership team aware that people outside the organization recognized that HR had put in place a world-class solution.

You need not write, or capture on video, a client's story in order to tap into this goodwill. Inviting a client to co-present at an industry conference or to share their own story on a webinar—for your company's customers and prospects—is also usually appreciated.

3. Consider your audience.

While it's important to remember how your key contact can gain a win when you tell their story, even if you publish it on your website, don't lose sight of how your readers or viewers—your customers and prospects—are likely to react.

Just like the reviewers within the client organization, your audiences understand complex business problems. They understand how difficult it can be to implement a solution. They understand that solving enterprise-level challenges is never a cut-and-dried proposition.

They also know firsthand how hard it can be to get results, especially those that sound too good to be true.

As a result, if you tell an oversimplified story about the amazing impact of your solution, your audiences are likely to see your story for what it is: a boasting, inaccurate, and incomplete story you’ve told out of context.

Puff up your solution too much and they'll smell a rat.

Keeping this in mind can help you stay focused on telling a story that is much more credible and isn’t too self-serving. By extension, when you keep your own audiences in mind, you will be better able to produce stories that get approved by the client organization's gatekeepers.

No Guarantees, But Better Odds

Even if you do everything right, and take all of the advice I’ve offered here, there’s still no guarantee a story will successfully make it through the client organization’s review and approval process. Increasingly, signed releases, reviews by legal teams, and the involvement of additional stakeholders mean it's more difficult than ever to get the green light to publish a story.

But you’ll better your chances if you create stories that are accurate, credible, and paint your client as the story’s true hero.