In a recent community discussion, customer marketing professionals shared their challenges and strategies around managing customer evidence and driving internal adoption. Here's what we learned from these frontline experts.
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The Common Challenge: Tracking Usage and Impact
The conversation kicked off with a familiar pain point many customer marketing professionals face: despite creating valuable customer success stories and evidence pieces, tracking their actual usage and impact remains challenging.
As Kristin M. notes, even with positive verbal feedback from sales and customer success teams about the value of these assets, metrics often tell a different story.
Distribution and Awareness Strategies
Several professionals shared their approaches to getting customer evidence in front of internal teams:
- Creating one-page summary slides of long-form case studies for easy pitch deck insertion (shared by Shelly Ryder)
- Promoting new stories across internal Slack channels including Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing teams (implemented by both Shelly and Becky Scott)
- Conducting "road shows" to multiple team meetings and all-hands calls (suggested by Kristin M.)
Tool Integration is Key
Emily Coleman offered a strategic perspective: "The key is figuring out where sales and CSMs spend most of their time and ensuring your content lives there." She's exploring proactive content serving based on open opportunities and upcoming check-in calls.
Several tools were discussed across organizations:
- Mindtickle for sales enablement (Shelly Ryder)
- Seismic for sales content management (Christine Newman)
- ReferenceEdge within Salesforce (previous experience shared by Shelly Ryder)
- Showpad and Templafy (mentioned by Kristin M.)
Project Management Solutions
For tracking customer story development, professionals shared various approaches:
- Trello boards with columns for different stages of the process (recommended by Casey Hibbard)
- Asana projects specifically for customer story management (used by Christine Newman)
- Excel templates for timeline tracking (currently used by Kristin M.)
Looking to the Future
The community is exploring innovative solutions to improve adoption:
- Becky Scott mentioned plans to explore AI for helping sales teams find relevant case studies
- Shelly Ryder is investigating Laudable for Gong to extract customer proof points from call recordings
Measuring Success
A key challenge highlighted by Kristin M. is demonstrating value to leadership. While tracking asset creation metrics (stories captured, approved, etc.) is straightforward, proving direct impact on deal closure remains difficult. Previous attempts at quarterly feedback surveys saw minimal participation, highlighting the need for more effective measurement strategies.
Key Takeaways
- Integration with existing workflows is crucial for adoption
- Multiple communication channels are needed for internal promotion
- Simplified formats (like one-pagers) increase usage
- Tracking and measurement remain industry-wide challenges
- Project management tools can streamline the creation process
As the discussion shows, while customer evidence is universally recognized as valuable, optimizing its delivery and measuring its impact continues to challenge even experienced customer marketing professionals. The key appears to be finding the sweet spot between accessibility, workflow integration, and meaningful metrics.
