Using customer “stories” to help sell your products (Part 1)
14th October 2015 - Last modified 13th November 2023
Written By David Robinson.
A researcher, or research manager generally needs to be convinced that a product will help them in their work before making a decision to purchase. In essence the questions are: “Will it help me get better results, get results faster, or save money?”
There are a number of ways of explaining to prospects how your product will do this, with the most convincing being a testimonial or endorsement through the (similar) work of another researcher. Of course testimonials can take many forms, from short quotes to in-depth customer stories in the form of case studies/articles, which are particularly persuasive because you can often use actual, independent data to back up your claims.
The Alto Marketing team meets with numerous life science companies in US and Europe every year, and there are two common reasons for not making more use of testimonials and customer research to sell products:
Good customer stories… just not enough internal resource to make the most of them
You’re in regular contact with your customers, know that they’re happy with your company and getting really good results. Even better – they are willing to talk publicly about it. Great! The only problem is you don’t have the internal resource to turn these into scientific marketing collateral. Your product managers are busy developing your products and applications specialists are busy working on new applications. We call this the “day job” scenario; your team spend all their time on doing their day job, and don’t have the time to devote to working with their customers to produce case studies and application notes as scientific marketing collateral.
This is where using experienced external scientific communications support is a life-saver! For example, at Alto Marketing we have a team of PhD-level scientists who have real expertise in developing compelling scientific marketing communications. Which allows your product managers and applications specialists to concentrate on their day job.
For help with case studies, white papers and all scientific marketing communications, find out more.
Not enough customer stories
For many companies it can be hard to find out about what their customers are doing with their products. This can be down to selling through distributors and not knowing who the end-customers are, or just not having the bandwidth to find out how customers are using the products and what data they are getting.
If you don’t know who your end-customers are, including a warranty registration card with the product packaging is a great way of getting their information. Alternatively, incentivise them to respond by promoting an offer (eg discount on next purchase or other “deals”).
With industry customers, getting them to speak is harder because of commercial confidentialities. But it’s not impossible. Don’t be afraid to ask and even, where possible, include in any contract the use of a case study for promotional purposes.
You might not have the bandwidth to follow up with your customers individually, so you can develop a programme to encourage them to speak about their work (or we can do this for you). After all, researchers (generally) want to tell as many people as possible about their successes, so make it easy for them by offering to do the work.
If you would like some more detailed advice on how to go about it, Alto Marketing can help. Our scientific communications team has years of experience in working with our clients’ customers to identify and create great case studies, application notes, articles and white papers.
In next week’s blog…
So you know your customers, you (or we:)) have interviewed them and are ready to develop some really persuasive scientific communications. Next week I’ll talk about the different types of communications and what you might do with them to enhance lead generation and brand development.
As life science marketing experts, we know and understand the media and routes to communicating with scientists. Our services also include:
- • Awareness raising PR programmes
- • Lead generating digital marketing campaigns
- • Event marketing for face-to-face contact
- • Strong brand development
- • Sales and marketing strategy
Written by David Robinson – Founder/Managing Director
