You’ve created the best product you could ever conceive. It has no flaws, no bugs, and anyone would be crazy not to buy it. Your salespeople are seasoned but also tech savvy, and your marketing materials are innovative, catchy and captivating. There’s no way someone wouldn’t buy from you, right?
Not necessarily.
Yes, the quality of your product is crucial when trying to get someone to buy it. But without peer reference or influence, people lack the trust factor necessary to make a purchase decision. Further, by the time buyers get to salespeople, they’ve already made 70% of their purchase decision through content they’ve found online, your website, and reviews posted about your product on various sites. So that 70% is where buyers are interacting the most with their peers, and where positive reviews are crucial. And in the final stages of the buying process, peer reviews are noted as the most significant influence.
So how can you make sure your company is getting positive reviews in all the stages of the buying process?
1) Keep your current customers happy. It seems like a no brainer, but you’d be surprised with how many companies don’t do this. You already won your customers over, so make sure you keep them by providing consistent support. This includes access to support if necessary, rapid responses to questions or comments, and supplemental content that helps them get the most out of your product. This is the most straightforward way to ensure positive reviews from existing customers.
2) Take the time to know your customers personally. If a current customer is able to speak to your character, or how you “valued” them and the conversations you had during the sales process, they will view you as a real person, a person worthy of talking to.
3) Make sure the right collateral exists for both peers and salespeople to share. This includes guides that compare your company to its competitors, as well as more top-of-the-funnel content that helps potential customers understand and diagnose their organizational problems.
4) Build a library of customer advocates. Having a collection of customers you know you can go to for positive references can be the difference between a won or lost deal. This goes with keeping your customers happy, but make sure to keep track of these positive relationships, what industry they’re in, and what their use cases are for your product. Being able to pull a testimonial that is relevant to a potential customer is a great way to differentiate you from the competition and add a personal touch to the meeting.
In most aspects of life, people trust people they know over an advertisement, website, or random sales rep. So, random sales rep, if you arm yourself with a valuable peer review or testimonial, prospects are much more likely to view you as someone trustworthy and worth their time.
