126. How To Turn Clients into Your Greatest Sales Asset

All right, we should be live. Welcome everybody. In today's video, we're going to talk about how to turn your clients into your greatest marketing and sales asset, but the title is sales asset. And if you had seen our live we did yesterday talking about growing your sales in what we're calling, we're using this term, the trust recession, because that's really what's happening these days is any competitor or any company out there really has the ability, you know, to market for inexpensively and create content and just blast content out there that doesn't have much value to it, but it's there to fill the void and create a lot of noise.

And that means that you're facing challenges of one, being able to reach enough of the right people. But number two, being able to consistently get in front of them. And that is really what marketing is, reach and consistency. But your only competition nowadays isn't the company down the street that sells a similar product or service.

but it's really the attention of people, which is more distracted than ever before. And so when you do get the attention, the challenge is that because of explosion of vendors, opportunities, barrier to creating new businesses is next to nothing nowadays, is trust. Getting your prospects to know you, to like you, and to trust you. And so the thing is that it's not going to work with everything you say about yourself because even if it's true, even if it's accurate, it really comes down to what others have to say about you and those who have authority, those who have credibility in what they're saying about your services, what you do.

That's why when you go to Amazon, even think of you're buying a $20 product on Amazon or you're buying a $200,000 product or service from a business, the Amazon product you go, what's the first thing you're looking at is the reviews. You're seeing how credible is this product that I'm buying? In the B2B realm, how credible is this business? How credible are its employees?

How credible are the claims that they're making about the results of this service? and ideally, you know, you're talking about those things and doing it the right way. And so the shift and what I believe is really the game changer, and I have some stats here to support this as well, is taking your clients and turning them into your absolute strongest, most powerful sales asset that you own. And I'm not talking about what we've traditionally done over the years is get a quote from our client.

it's written. Sure, that's great. It's kind of generic. We plaster it to our website.

Maybe we include a couple in our proposals. And then that's the extent of it. That's the extent of what you're doing for your client endorsement marketing. But think of it like this.

Your business changes, your product changes, your service changes, who you're marketing to may shift and adjust over the years. And these things evolve over the years. So if you have a testimonial from 10 years ago, how credible is that? And the other thing is how that testimonial is one captured, but also how it's promoted and how it's marketed.

By the way, if you enjoy these, make sure you like it, share it with your team. I want to hear from you. I want to hear your thoughts. And if you don know me maybe you watching this you have seen me before on stages our B2B Mentors podcast we been doing for a number of years Done lots of content thousands of pieces of content you know over the last decade But my name is Connor Doobie and speaker, entrepreneur, CMO at ProvenContentConverterVisit.

com. And I love nerding out about these things and marketing. And I'm not just doing this on theory. You know, who am I to be talking about this?

Well, in our proven content business alone, worked with hundreds and hundreds of technical B2B organizations and have produced upwards of 40, 50,000 custom pieces of marketing assets and campaigns over that period of time. And so we've really been in the trenches to see what works and what doesn't work. And there has been a shift, right? Again, we go back and look at what AI has done in the marketing world.

Anybody can go in, plug some prompts into GPT and create 500 articles and blast them out. But how effective are they? And if you fall into this category too, is there something different you could be doing either in addition or in exchange for what you have been doing with using AI and getting back to the roots of if, for example, I am a chief marketing officer, right? I want to hear from, and I want to learn from other chief marketing officers.

By the way, if you hear whatever going on outside, they're doing construction next door. So I apologize if that's getting picked up here, can't really do anything about that. So we're just going to roll with it. We're live.

So we're on the spot. And so, so peers, people want to learn from their peers. Think of any of your ideal client persona. Maybe they're engineer directors, procurement department, CTO, CIO, they're scientists, right?

They're doctors, they own medical practices. And it's not just like you're selling directly to them, but you're selling to their enterprise or company, which means that you're having to go through five, six, seven different decision makers to get a B2B sale closed. And this is where endorsement marketing and being able to leverage your clients as your greatest marketing asset by one, capturing the story behind what you've accomplished for them and creating it in a specific way to talk about the results in a tangible and specific way.

not just, hey, this company's great. We love working with them. They're fantastic. That doesn't do anything to show your credibility and to show what I would say is like social proof, but more so going into a robust story about that client.

What were the reservations? That's such a powerful question when you're getting testimonial content is, hey, Mr. and Mrs. client, what were your reservations about working with us, right?

What were your fears about hiring us in the very beginning? What were some of the biggest challenges and problems that you're facing before you decided to hire us? What were some of the results that you've experienced from hiring us? And what are your recommendations for others that are maybe considering doing that?

And from a single interview, right? This is where I think there's just untapped potential and unmined gold in your clients and turning them into a great sales asset is not just taking a quote, plastering on your website, but turning that into video, which is incredibly powerful. And people can see your eyes, they can see your smile, they can see your face. In this case, your clients you know, persona and visibly see them, that makes a huge difference.

In fact, we've done this a lot. All of our pretty much all of our testimonials and our proposals are video assets and same with our website and same with the marketing materials we send out which brings me to my next point is well taking one step back video Okay Visual graphic That you know, visual impactful visuals that are either animated, they're static, they look really good. There's hundreds of different ways you can craft these from a client endorsement interview. Um, So the video asset, the visual graphics and also written, in which case I don't think people really have the time to go in and download.

And you correct me if I'm wrong, if you disagree with me or anyone here disagrees with me, I'm curious to hear your thoughts to go in and read a 25 page white paper case study. instead you can compact the meat out of that and turn it into a five six hundred word what we call in our business a client success story okay and then this is a usable marketing asset that's not just sitting on your website but you're able to use it on your website of course but also in your marketing if you're doing outbound campaigns newsletters uh for your in-house list outbound email, if your salespeople are in process, being able to get that into their hands for sales enablement, it's so much easier to prospect when you're doing it from a result and what other clients are saying about you versus just what you're saying about yourself.

And then also think of paid channels. If you're running ads or running LinkedIn promotions, being able to run those as video assets of your clients talking about their experience with you is incredibly powerful. So one is how you're capturing those assets. And then two is what you're actually doing with them to market.

This is a marketing program. This is a marketing activity. This isn't a, you know, flat capture paste as an asset and a resource such as hanging out on our on our website. This is berry gold for your marketing.

Think of how you're going out to promote your business. Now, think of going out and promoting your business with your clients leading the way as your greatest, you know, basically ambassador, salesperson, enforcer of the messaging that you've been using and touting and talking about. And here's some interesting stats too, is 75% of potential buyers rely on endorsements to choose a vendor. Okay.

Okay, 75% of potential buyers are going to rely on endorsements to choose a vendor. How you position those endorsements is incredibly important. 97% of B2B customers cited testimonials and peer recommendations as the most reliable type of content. So if you think of your clients who are hanging out with their peers, and you've probably gotten business this way from word of mouth referrals, but that's not scalable.

You can't just scale and grow your business on word of mouth referrals. If you're able to take those, turn those into marketing assets and be able to get them out into cold marketing channels for people who don't know you yet. They don't trust you. They don't like you yet.

There's huge power in that. And then using customer testimonials regularly can generate approximately 62% more revenue. Okay. Let's say, for example, that stat happens to be overinflated.

Let's say it's 32%. And by the way, these come from Vocal Video, Cube Creative, and SalesIntel.io are the sources for these studies. But let's say that's overinflated, it's half.

Well, 32% growth for a company that's doing a million a year, 5 million a year, 50 million a year, 500 million a year is pretty significant if you ask me compared to maybe what you're doing now. So if you can actually use endorsements and it doesn have to be just clients think of ambassadors on your team Think of influencers who have the audience of the prospects you're trying to reach and being able to cross collaborate endorsements from them to be able to promote out into their audience is powerful.

And of course your client endorsements and think of partners. Your partners may have credibility that you don't. It's called borrowed credibility and you can and should be using it in B2B marketing. Now, part of my reasoning behind this too is let me pull this page up here so I can share this with everybody.

And if you're still watching up to this point, I appreciate you. Make sure you share this. Make sure you like this. Okay, drop a comment and DM me too.

DM me if you think that this is, you know, whether you see yourself as a partner, we can collaborate on this stuff. And possibly you may need help on this, which brings me to this point. We've only been doing this for 25 years for technical B2B industries. And so we do have a summer special and, you know, with this program going on called Client Endorsement Marketing Solutions.

So if you're sitting there, you're watching this. Hey, Connor, this is great. Our team, we don't have the time. It's really been difficult for us to get our clients to create testimonial content with us.

And that's not uncommon. There's great power in having a third party authority and a vendor who can help to do it, create incentives around it for your clients, and then go out and develop the material in the promotional strategy for client endorsement marketing. So if you want to reduce resistance in your sales process, you want to overcome hesitancy. I'm sure a lot of you have been feeling hesitancy from your buyers just in this economic environment and in recent economic environments.

And it's always going to be the case moving forward is buyer hesitancy is just baked into the cake for B2B sales. And then, you know, your competitors, If you're not the ones to do this and you're not the ones to demonstrate the why and the value, your competitors are going to do it for you. And you don't want that. You want to be the one who is the authority, who is seen as credible.

And then, of course, if you want to maximize your company's most valuable assets, this is what we do at Proven Content. Reach out to us at provencontent.com. we can put together a custom roadmap, you know, pricing, show you how this works, how this has worked for other clients of ours and start creating a very focused campaign that's totally unique to, I guarantee probably how you've been marketing and is really geared towards endorsement marketing and leveraging those influencers and ambassadors.

So you can always reach out to us, provencontent.com and then if you just, you know, you have questions, you wanna talk to me wherever you're seeing this. I know we're streaming on YouTube, we're streaming on LinkedIn, we're streaming on Facebook. X, for whatever reason, doesn't wanna cooperate with me anymore on StreamYard, so we're not streaming there right now, but can't thank you enough for your time, attention, for watching this.

And even, you know, just in between now and then, I'll give you some homework. Go out, find at least one client that's had a recent success. go capture them on video turn that into a great video asset go do a write up on it go create some visual content actually use it plug it into one of the campaigns that you're doing right now but shift it from the focus of why you're so great to why hey here's our client a peer of yours here's why they think we're great and watch the magic happen much love to you my friends make it great we'll see you on the next one Thank you.