Getting Customers to Shill for You
July 1998
Corporate objectives vary, but you can always count on one common denominator: Companies want to sell more stuff.
Unfortunately, PR tends to shy away from the sales function. Now, I'm not suggesting every PR professional should periodically pound the pavement making cold sales calls (although it's not a bad idea). But every PR program can map into a company's sales effort in a straightforward way: it's called customers--specifically, leveraging customers into a tactical PR plan.
Time and time again, research shows customers are enormously influential with prospective buyers. To delve into that dynamic, we commissioned a primary research study from IDG last year, involving interviews with 75 IT executives. No surprises. Sixty-seven percent rated recommendations from peers as either "extremely important" or "very important," making peers the No. 1 source of information. Advertisements in trade publications, meanwhile, scored 15 percent, and vendors' web sites came in at 33 percent.
When researchers asked why, the one word that consistently played back was "trust." IT decision makers trust peers because they're grappling with the same challenges, goals, expectations and fears.
A corporate buyer of technology, of course, differs from Aunt Zelda who decides to splurge on a sub-$1,000 PC complete with coupon for a free box of floppies. And, obviously, brand recognition comes into play in the consumer space, but happy customers contribute to a successful brand. Thus, most importantly, showcasing your customers' satisfaction enhances the selling process regardless of product type.
With that as a backdrop, let's move to the greatest challenge: Getting customers to participate. Just finding customers can turn into a quest for the Holy Grail. Many product managers and marketing managers choose to stay planted to their comfy desks, never leaving for the exotic land called "the field" where customers reside. If your product marketing people never venture out, you should work directly with your sales team to connect with customers.
You'll find the typical sales person has an almost maniacal focus on closing deals (precisely as it should be). After all, his or her compensation is tied to commissions based on sales. To overcome this short-term dynamic, you'll need to do some of your own "selling" and educating on how PR benefits the sales process.
The other key to establishing rapport with the sales folks involves communicating interactions that take place between PR and the customer. As you would expect, salespeople can be somewhat protective of their customers, but an ongoing flow of information diffuses this issue.
If your product sells through distributors, your customer support organization, with its database of warranties, can be a great source for customers. And working directly with distributors and resellers will uncover customers.
Of course, once you've zeroed in on specific customers, you've still got to convince them to participate in the PR program. Here's where the process typically gets derailed.
Asking a senior IT executive to enthusiastically tout your company's product or service is not exactly a compelling sales pitch. We've experienced success by explaining how the IT executive will be positioned as an industry expert, not as a cheerleader for the vendor.
It's also important to communicate the benefits of gaining visibility in the industry. Most IT organizations, for example, find the supply of talent can't keep pace with their demand. Being recognized for outstanding work, a leading-edge deployment or an expert perspective, elevates the IT organization in the eyes of both prospective and current employees.
With agreements from customers secured, the question becomes how to effectively elevate their stories and perspective. Certainly, the more depth shared about the customer, the more effective the communications. Stories with depth, for example, should answer questions such as (1) What was the challenge? (2) How did the client's product or service overcome the challenge? or (3) What are the soft and quantified benefits?
With such depth, an application article provides a vehicle to tell a customer's story. Some trade publications accept customer application articles ghostwritten by an outside resource. The key to landing such ghostwritten stories involves taking a journalistic, not a promotional, tone with the article.
Similarly, in the case of pitching a customer in hopes that a publication will assign a reporter to the story, you need to crisply articulate the challenge experienced by the customer and how the challenge was overcome. Also bear in mind that publications prefer to cover customers with known names. Finally, providing the reporter with complete and uncontrolled access to a customer represents a plus from the publication's perspective.
In addition to application articles, customers can add value in a range of ways--from supporting product announcements to speaking at conferences and serving as an expert resource on industry topics.
In the big picture, customer satisfaction cuts to the core of any company's success. By taking ownership for delivering the customer's voice front and center, public relations can directly contribute to the selling process. A focus on customers also generates benefits beyond the selling process. When interviewing customers, for example, you can gently probe for issues or potential dissatisfaction--valuable input for both marketing and sales.
Above all, interacting with customers delivers a nice dose of reality to a PR program. It's one thing to develop corporate positioning and pristine product messages in an ivory tower. It's quite another to undertake these types of exercises with first-hand knowledge of the customer.
-- Lou Hoffman
Lou Hoffman is president of The Hoffman Agency, an international high-tech PR firm with offices in San Jose, Denver, Singapore and Tokyo. Email him at lhoffman@hoffman.com.
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