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THE ART OFCUSTOMERSTORYTELLINGInsights about how to find and tell better stories and harness the power of your customers.

An Important Quiz

Yes No

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Does your company have accessible customer stories powerful enough to help you win new business?

Shortest answerIncrease sales using your best asset.

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This is about finding those stories within your happiest customers and harnessing them to support your business. It’s about how to structure evidence and validation into your offering as a powerful form of sales enablement and marketing.

It is for sales and marketing leaders and those responsible for creating customer references within their organization.

In this ebook we hope to share specific stories about storytelling to advance your sales and marketing efforts.

Shorter answerWe’re going to help you understand the power of good customer references and how to make stories work harder for you.

Short answerEvery company has customer stories to tell. Some don’t know they have them, some don’t tell them well while others miss the mark by using them to carry marketing too overtly.

So what is this all about?

This is about finding those stories within your happiest customers and harnessing them to support your business. It’s about how to structure evidence and validation into your offering as a powerful form of sales enablement and marketing.

It is for sales and marketing leaders and those responsible for creating customer references within their organization.

In this ebook we hope to share specific stories about storytelling to advance your sales and marketing efforts.

Marketing and sales people have been telling stories for centuries by finding the right story for the right occasion to win more business.

Some stories are more fluff than others. And when the business is telling a story, people can’t help but to be skeptical. It’s just the way it is.

It is a primer on how to findand tell better stories and harness the power of your customers.

The truth is, when your customers are talking about you and the things you do to make their lives easier, other people naturally pay more attention. It stands to reason that telling better, more deeply engaging stories will address skepticism and build greater authenticity and trust.

That is what this eBook is all about.

A better way to market?

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Validation and evidence

Table of Contents

Customer Story Platform

Difference Between a Customer Reference Program and a Customer Story Platform

What’s Missing From Customer Reference Programs?

10 Elements of a Great Customer Story

The Customer Story Platform Model

How Can a Customer Story Platform Help Salespeople?

Centerline Digital Customer Reference Hub

Conclusion

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Customer Reference Program

• Stores reference assets

• Tracks how often customers are being used

• Tracks reference-able customers

• Fields requests for testimonials

• Hybrid between a contact database and a Content Management System

Customer Story Platform

• Built on a solid content strategy

• Focus is on the quality of the story told

• Emphasis on story creation, higher-quality

• Custom-tailored story creation

• Creating persuasion from objective, third-parties

• Making the most relevant stories readily accessible

Customer Reference Programs are primarily about gathering and managing testimonial assets to support and/or shorten sales cycles. The emphasis is on asset management and reference contacts and not the quality and efficacyof the content. Customer Story Platform (CSP) is a concept created by Centerline Digital to address the most common limitation of most traditional Customer Reference Programs, the customer’s authentic story. The platform is the key.

The Customer Story Platform was built for enterprise sales-forces, who need: high-quality, reusable story assets that can be used online, in social media, in presentations, conferences, kiosks, etc. to help them win business.

The CSP is about capturing the right stories for the right reasons and targeting the right outputs to get the most out of the stories being told.

Difference Between a Customer Reference Program and aCustomer Story Platform

5 It is best to focus efforts on fewer high impact customers than dilute focus across many, perhaps less compelling, customer stories.

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Where to Invest The Payoff

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More engaged storytellers, improved level of confidence, more compelling stories. They are the evidence.

Deepen engagement, broaden appeal, make it spreadable, increase efficacy.

Extract the best possible story, surface the best details, keep the story objective. Uncover salient details.

Allow your audience to visualize their problems in your hands. Appeal to the broadest audience.

Take a stand, have a differentiated insight, make the story more memorable. Illuminate your focal point that helps validate your offering with strength.

Tighten up the story. Make it more professional, more believable and easier to internalize.

Find the right customers.

Make the story interesting.

Prepare the interviewer.

Make the story clear and understandable.

Zero in on the insight.

Editing.

Think of the Customer Story Platform......as a substance layer that sits on top of your customer reference program that makes your multimedia assets better. The Customer Story Platform is for companies that want to augment their existing customer reference programs with more engaging, substantive and results-based stories. The Customer Story Platform is not a replacement for a Customer Reference Program — they work in unison.

We built the platform to allow people to focus on increasing the quality of those dynamic, reusable videos of your happiest customers validating your business and your offering. We built it because we know these stories don’t happen by accident. They require focused energy and investment. The platform helps people gain that focus.

6Customer references are most effective when used as a high-level entry point in the conventional sales funnel. They are best used to enthuse and advance a discussion, and not as an attempt to include all relevant sales and marketing information.

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• More energy is going into explaining your past client experiences than showing them.

• You are delivering several hours of testimonial with only a few seconds of insight.

• Your sales people aren’t using good customer stories everyday.

• Your new client prospects aren’t persuaded.

• You aren’t putting them into presentations, conferences, pitches, social media and websites.

• You have to “bug” your past clients to field phone calls from your prospects.

• You’re more worried about reference burnout than winning the deal.

• You’re spending more time looking for that one story from last year that no one can seem to find.

• Your customer references sound more like a product demonstration than an outside perspective about you.

• People are dropping out before they finish seeing the story in its entirety.

Your Current References Aren’t Working if ...

7 A conversational tone, versus a sales-oriented one, is more engaging and persuasive.

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What’s MissingFrom Customer ReferencePrograms?

Story.

Your customers each have a story to tell — and that story is the content that can support your next big win.

Customer stories provide a unique opportunity for existing customers to earn you additional business. Let’s face it: however you market yourself, your messaging and positioning simply can’t compete with validation of your cus-tomers telling their story on your behalf — compellingly, sincerely, persuasively. Your future customers want more than a simple business transaction. They want to know that you can offer what they need, that you are the right fit and that you, the company, can understand them because you’ve helped others like them.

We know storytelling will help you craft that right fit.

We see customer story design as the act of turning complex business problems into easy-to-follow content.

Impart extended benefit and greater knowledge to the customer beyond the immediate solution implementation story.

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Better fishermen typically know more about fishing, know the techniques, catch limits, etc. and they find better fishing holes. Better storytellers, by the same token, know where to find the best stories — at the very least, they know where your most authentic and persuasive stories are, how to catch the stories and know their limits.

Storytelling is complicated. If your offering or sales cycles are steeped in complexity, and the value of that offering is difficult to understand, it’s possible that one story isn’t capable of telling it all. Consider telling the story in pieces.

Key questions to uncover your best story:

1) What customer is most invested in your success — whose success is tied to yours?

2) What customer is evolving or maturing your offering the most?

3) What sale of your offering had the greatest impact on the customer and their market?

4) Who is most capable of making your offering a no-brainer?

A successful customer story not only speaks to the solution or service you provide, but also how the customer was able to reach their own goals and growth because of the support and collaboration they received from you.

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How to Find the Right, Great Stories

• Your best stories will have, at the same time, broad appeal to create more connections to a wider set of prospects and narrowed insights that really resonate with specific audiences.

• They should be able to be told verbally and create a strong positive reaction.

• They should be told by people who are legitimately interested in the story’s origin and outcome. Their interest in the story being told provides the strength required to make it work.

• They should be told from a personal point of view.

• They should have some distance from your brand.

Where will your customer reference videos be delivered once they are completed (your website, to a specific person, a social media channel, etc.)? Knowing this in advance helps define the content of the video... and will help you know where the video will be best-leveraged or posted (your website, YouTube, etc.).

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ght,

Strategic1. Interesting story

2. Interviewer knowledge

3. Story clarity

4. Quantifiable results customer is

comfortable talking about

5. Substance vs. Aesthetics

6. Thought-provoking insights

Functional7. Preproduction

8. Editing

9. Supporting footage

10. Story activation

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Every customer story is different but the best ones have the same underlying “magic” in common. By balancing your focus and energy on the 10 strategic and functional elements, the stories you tell will truly change the way your prospects respond to the value you offer. They are:

The interviewee’s position within their company should relate directly to the primary audience you wish to reach with the reference. Interview your client’s CEO if that is the role you wish to reach next.

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10 Elements of a Great Customer Story

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12 In the delivery of the story, passion and personality is just as important as the story itself when the goal is motivat-ing a potential customer to take action.

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1. INTERESTING STORYv

Your stories need to hold the audience’s interest, but what’s interesting to you may not be for those buying your solutions. It’s what they see that is important. Depending on the goal of your story, you may need to adjust accordingly, but for most intents and purposes, you really have to empathize with your audience. Here’s a trick: look at “interesting” from five different perspectives:

1) What’s interesting to you and your brand?

2) What’s interesting to your prospect?

3) What’s interesting to your prospect’s customers?

4) What’s interesting to an independent analysts researching your offering and that of your nearest direct competitor?

5) Finally, what do these perspectives have in common? What are the most significant findings? Can these perspectives help you craft an interesting story?

INTERVIEWER KNOWLEDGE

13 Location based interviews tend to be more compelling as the story can be visually supported and the interviewees are typically more relaxed.

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2The catch has a lot to do with the quality of the fisherman. By that same token, interview-ers play a critical role in creating your best stories. They know how to create the best possible conditions to extract the optimal narrative. And it’s not just about the story. It’s just as much about the story-teller. A great interviewer knows the story intimately and knows how to bring it to the surface.

He or she knows how to shape the narrative, how to comfort the storytellers, and how to listen and bring out the best. A good inter-viewer knows how to balance objectivity with the benefits of your offering in an environment of authenticity, and does so with experience. If the story isn’t coming to the surface, good interviewers know how to find it through the voice and character of the storyteller.

3.STORY

CLARITYClarity is very important. The hardest thing is to make a unique insight understandable, relevant and persuasive.

Clarity is what makes your story successful. Here is a valuable exercise: with existing stories in mind, ask yourself the following questions about their clarity:

1) Can you distill the story down into 10 words?

2) Can you find the sharable insight?

3) If you swap your name out with a competitor’s, does the story still make perfect sense? If so, you need to modify.

4) Does the story compel people to think clearly about how you solve problems?

5) Are your stories focusing on the customer more than your offering?

6) Does your story draw a line between what is and what can be?

7) Does the story build? Does it motivate listeners to want more?

8) Is there any doubt that your customer benefited from your involvement?

14 At the current rate of growth, video will overtake written content in terms of use within most buying processes.

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In the medium of video it’s best draw out the story through its main points, high level conversation. The inspiring points that viewers can relate to.

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Proof. Your customer stories should be centered around evidence and validation. Is there clear, irrefutable evidence that your solution helpedyour customer solve a problem worth solving? And to what degree? Capturing that “essence” authentically is a silver bullet.

Think about the stories you want to tell and how you want them to be heard. You want the stories you tell to tactfully and powerfully compel people to take a step closer to considering your offering. You want your prospects to hear the story and feel an increased confidence in yoursolutions. Having one customer share their experience with your prospects does this. Sharing concrete results makes that story stronger.

In order to get your customer to state that, because of your offering, they had a 45% increase in overall revenue over a 12 month period, or something to that effect, you have to make sure they are comfortable saying so. They have to own that statement.

The key to this is your customer’s ability to “own” their result. Sometimes the outcomes are softer and less quantifiable. Stating they had a happier company culture as a result is easy to say because it’s not quantifiable. Your audience is left to interpret the value of that outcome in terms of their problems and needs. And leaving this up to interpretation is a way to devalue the story’s intent.

QUANTIFIABLE RESULTS A CUSTOMER IS COMFORTABLE TALKING ABOUT4.

16 You want to get viewers to see themselves in the same situation, empathize with their hardships, be inspired by their journey and moved to action.

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There are two sides to quality. We’ve developed this simple “story algebra” to balance cinematography and shot composition with story substance and clarity:

People who create customer reference assets (stories)struggle with this balance everyday. They wonder howmuch (very finite) energy they should devote to writing orshaping a story vs. how much they should spend on theaesthetics and in post production.

While mileage may vary, there is always a good balance tobe struck between the aesthetic and the story’s substance.

You know you are balancing the equation when youroutcomes are successful and you’re staying on budget.

5. Substance vs. Aesthetics

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1. INTERESTING STORYv

17 The speaker or speakers must be able to express their story with passion and authenticity. This is the difference between “storytelling” and “selling.”

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A thought-provoking and relevant insight is one of the best ways to validate your offering. Without insight, your customer’s story is just marketing. With insight, you will create meaning.

Think about it this way: Your prospect has seen your customer reference video on your website. They are interested but not yet ready to buy from you. What are the things you want your prospects to take away if they aren’t immediately persuaded to buy your offering? Answer: You want them to come away from the story with a strong, memorable feeling that your company “gets” them. You want to diminish doubt and skepticism that your company understands customers, is adaptive and competent. And you want all this essence to come from your customer’s story.

We believe your stories should deliver unique and meaningful insight into “why you?” And with that, the story should heighten the customer’s confidence in your ability to address their unique challenge. In the example below, we illustrate a complex story with a hierarchy of insights.

The overall insight above is using bigger data as a crime fighting tool. The subject isabout fighting the mayor’s crime problem.The object is newer and more agile views into bigger data. The supporting role was played by Technology X Company. It’s more about the insight and less about the company.

THOUGHT PROVOKING INSIGHT6

Example for Technology X Company:“I knew the only way I was going to beable to solve the mayor’s problem was tooutsmart our city’s crime with newer andmore agile views into bigger data.Technology X Company had the platformand ideas that could help me reducecrime by 20% in 9 months, and theyworked through my unique situation withme.”

7Preproduction makes everything smoother. Done right, it assures you are getting the right people, locations, shots and ultimately, the story.

Having preproduction time to research, talk with subject experts, client, sales reps, business partners and the customer also contributes to the overall quality and relevance of the story. Good planning is never evident in a well-told story — unfortunately bad planning is.

Through effective preproduction you are able to scout and select the best location, interview and select the most appropriate contacts, and set up the right conditions to capture quality supporting footage (B-roll.) These may seem like “nice-to-haves” but are always the difference between a good story and a successful story.

18 Think about where within the buying process your viewers are: (Influencer early on, purchaser later on?) How does this affect the stories you want to create?

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PREPRODUCTIONPREPRODUCTION

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19The speaker/customer is providing their story as a reference for you, their story contains the benefits provided by your products or services, so it should be about their story and not the story (messaging, product name drops) you want them to tell.

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A good story is told three times. Once in the preparation, once in the shoot and then again in the edit suite.

You can interview for hours and find the most powerful story packed full of insights and validation and have it fall flat because of a poor edit. Imbalance between story substance and post-production can mean the difference between a very successful reference and a vast waste of time, energy and money.

Good editing is about drawing out the personality of the customer in a way that feels natural, authentic and integrated. This is a delicate sensibility,and not a one-size-fits-all. The director needs to communicate to the editor how to best portray the client’s brand.

The most common editing mistakes that prohibit the success of good stories are:

1) Edit is too tightly packed—interviewees seem like they’re speed-talking.

2) There are too many details drowning out the insights.

3) There is no sense of gravity that ties the importance of the story to the audience.

4) The keystone resolution to the problem isn’t clear.

5) You settle on too much company (you), and too little customer (them).

8.EDITING

We call supporting footage, “B-roll.” B-roll helps illustrate the customer’s personality and brand then ties it to the larger story. It provides the backdrop, helps carry the weight of context (of the solution and the speaker) and can help set the tone of your entire story.

It’s difficult to plan sometimes, but knowing in advance where you can film good environment, tone and setting shots will pay off in huge dividends. Your editors will certainly agree.

Directing the photographer/cameraman and associated team to capture B-roll appropriate to the customer brand leads to a much more interesting and cohesive story. Always grab as much as you can.

Many companies have excellent B-roll all ready to go. Don’t forget to consider the work that those before you may have done.

Videos are accessed most by INFLUENCERS early in the purchasing process – and they are most often found off the corporate website. Videos are accessed more by DECISION MAKERS later in the process – and they are most often viewed on the corporate website. Take this into consideration in how you package and proliferate your references.

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SUPPORTING FOOTAGE

Escaping the noise with your customer references takes both quality CONTENT and CONTEXT. This will help you create a signal that your target audience can separate from the noise.

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Activation is what happens to the story once it’s completed and “out there”. Activation is how you amp up your assets to work harder for you.

While “put it on YouTube” isn’t a strategy or a mea-sure of success, it’s a smart tactic for many reasons. One in particular is the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) value you derive. YouTube, Vimeo and other video posting sites are indexed for search better than the video embedded on your site. Posting your video on those sites with strategically chosen tags and description, will make your story more “findable”. Another activation strategy is to break up the full customer reference story into smaller or individual soundbites that can be used in blog posts, banner ads, on video posting sites, and other search-engine fr iendly places around the web. You wil l beamplifying the message, pollinating links back to your website where your customers may spend time. In addition, your smaller snippets can also be well leveraged by sales reps in meetings and events, etc.

Also, when you have a platform view of your story assets, you’ll gain an advantage by seeing the additional pieces of your story broken up into smaller, more digestible parts. This will help you see how great assets can be repurposed or applied to other sales and marketing efforts. (Don’t forget to look on the cutting room floor.)

Your videos can also have a life beyond the web. Get them on the desktops of your sales team through the use of a desktop widget, mobile application, feature them in an email campaign and use them at trade shows and other events.

In all cases, they’re compelling pieces that direct people to you.

STORYACTIVATION

The overall insight above is using bigger data as a crime fighting tool. The subject isabout fighting the mayor’s crime problem.The object is newer and more agile views into bigger data. The supporting role was played by Technology X Company. It’s more about the insight and less about the company.

It’s not enough to plan for, capture, edit and activate your great customer stories. You also have to store or archive them intelligently — so those who need them can access the right stories, instantly — not allowing them to fall into the content chasm (that area of content between what’s publicly available and what’s private or behind the firewall).

This content chasm is a growing challenge in most companies. It is deep and widening! It holds an evolving and maturing collection of sales enablement tools such as customer reference videos, presentations and product demonstration animations. When this chasm grows, so does the problem of accessing the right tools for the right purposes quickly and effectively.

Compounding this challenge is a growing organization’s quality control, along with the savvy salesperson’s requirement to build better sales presentations with the best existing assets in minutes rather than hours or even days.

There are tools that address this problem by allowing salespeople and marketers to access the right stories by keeping them categorized and cataloged and ready to go.*

* The Reference Hub is a Web application developed by Centerline Digital to categorize and catalog customer reference story assets. It provides ready access to your company’s internal sales and marketing assets and allows employees to stitch together their own string of assets to tell a better story.

CUSTOMERSTORYPLATFORMMODEL

You cannot underestimate the importance of an original voice. The interviewee shouldn't sound like a marketing person or have an over-polished delivery. S/he should come off as a real-world person who had to solve a real-world challenge.

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Imagine having a salesforce that is able to tell stories that professionally validate your company’s offering, using quality dialog from your best customers. A Customer Story

Platform should help salespeople and marketers by giving them access to the company’s growing collection of sales enablement assets quickly.

By enabling salespeople to pick from a tightly curated and tag-based body of video references and other media, they can cut the time

required to build compelling presentations in half—or better.

Additionally, they can all store their best compilations for other salespeople or continually improve on their own.

Once done, they can simply send or share their new creations in any way they see fit.

This cuts the sales cycle down, ensures that onlythe very best impressions are being made

and better equips future sales efforts.

HOW CAN A CUSTOMERSTORY PLATFORM HELP

SALESPEOPLE?

23A picture is worth a 1000 words while a metaphor is worth 1000 pictures. Use an interesting metaphor or analogy. Inter-viewees should be able to crystalize the issues they deal with in a metaphor that makes a complex issue easy to understand.

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PREPRODUCTIONPREPRODUCTION

The Reference Hub is a media asset management system on steroids. It helps fast-moving sales and marketing professionals create riveting presentations on the run.

Among its many purposes, it:

1) Allows people to access the very best assets to piece together the best presentation in minutes.

2) Ensures the highest quality output by allowing the team to discriminate each asset — quality in, quality out.

3) Is all tag-based allowing people to quickly find specific assets.

4) Allows people to build, distribute and share their creations as they see fit.

5) Allows people to record their own introductions to customize their presentations.

The Centerline Digital Reference Hub

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John LaneVice President of Strategy and Creativejohn@centerline.nettwitter: johnvlane

Erin CraftAccount Executiveerin@centerline.nettwitter: erincraft

Every company is different and so is every story. Once you have a system and platform in place allowing your team to perfect the necessary storytelling elements (plan, shoot, produce, activate and warehouse), the sky is the limit for the types of sales and outreach your company can perform.

To us, storytelling for sales and marketing and employee engagement is about setting exciting new benchmarks around quality, creativity, results and access. For 15 years we have been using ideas, technology and hard work to create a storytelling platform for one of the world’s largest and oldest companies. This has given us the opportunity to blast through the obstacles and help people use better assets to work smarter with less energy.

Centerline Digital is a group of Raleigh, NC-based writers, directors, strategists, Web/Mobile/Social creatives,animators and editors. The stories we help our clients tell have to yield results, so we call ourselves accountable storytellers.

If you would like to learn more about the subject of this eBook, ask questions or learn more about our capabilities and experience, please contact us at 919.821.2921 or at the email addresses below.

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