It’s 1994 and a Cutco salesman shows up at your door, hawking “the sharpest set of knives you’ve ever seen.”
Do you:
- Shoo him out the door,
- Take him at his word, or
- Time travel to 2024, where you can actually verify his pitch?
Today, when people hear an outlandish claim from vendors, they don’t believe it right away. Instead, they look to their peers as trustworthy sources of information.
Yet every day, B2B vendors behave as though prospects will believe them when they say, “Our solution is the best one, and you should buy it right now!”—without evidence to back up their story.
Buyers are even more skeptical (and rightfully so) when it comes to a product that will cost them tens of thousands of dollars, given how many times they’ve been burned by expensive tools that didn’t deliver on their promises.
We’ve listened to the market and heard GTM teams loud and clear: B2B vendors desperately need to prove their claims. The solution to buyer mistrust, stiff competition, and stalled sales cycles is customer evidence — and a platform to put it into practice.
What is customer evidence?
Customer evidence is statements or statistics, straight from verified buyers, that prove the value of your product or service.
When you picture customer evidence, your first thought might be of customer testimonials and case studies. Both are usually written by the vendor — not the customer/end-user. They’re also handpicked by the vendor, who cherrypicks the best examples and biggest success outliers.
This “proof” isn’t just skewed—it’s also packed with vague and fluffy statements like “easy to use” and “we like it a lot.”
Not all that helpful for your buyers, right?
Customer evidence goes much deeper since it drives more detailed feedback around things like ROI. Here are a few examples of what this unbiased feedback looks like:
- Industry proof points: original research and data that verifies that the problem you solve is painful for other companies like your customers
- Feature-specific validation: customer descriptions of how they drive value from specific functions within your product
- Competitive evidence: in-depth anecdotes about why customers chose your solution over other products on the market
- Quantifiable ROI data: trackable stats about how your product drove revenue, saved time, or otherwise boosted business value for customers
- Account-level stories: deep-dive case studies that detail how multiple teams have benefited from your product at a customer’s organization
Evidence-based marketing (EBM) has taken up residence in the spotlight in other industries like healthcare, finance, and tech. This approach leans on evidence to draw conclusions, like the medical and scientific communities.
EBM builds trust with buyers because real-world evidence from actual customers is the best way for B2B companies to back up their messaging and value proposition.
When companies tap customers as “brand storytellers”, their friends and network are much more likely to believe them — which creates a massive advantage.
Companies make bogus claims all the time. Plenty of brands use positioning that’s vague, uncompelling to their audience, or both. Evidence-based marketing stands apart from untrustworthy or flimsy messaging because it proves you’re not just blowing smoke — you have the verified proof to back up what you’re saying.
But why do you need it now?
Why do you need customer evidence?
Trust levels in the B2B world are at an all-time low. In fact, B2B company websites are the least trusted source for content.
“Use customer evidence” may sound like an abstract answer to this widespread mistrust in the market. But that’s the thing about customer evidence: it’s not abstract, it’s concrete.
The real superpower of customer evidence is that it can solve the specific problems your team is facing right now:
- A new (or old) competitor has popped up who’s eating you for breakfast, and your sales team is struggling to prove your solution is better
- The old-school approach to addressing net retention problems isn’t working, and you can’t scale your business until you right the ship
- You’re relying on product-led growth, but having difficulty capturing the user insights that will lead to better retention and expansion
- Your messaging and positioning are fluffy. You’re the hundredth company to describe your product as “easy to use,” so demand gen isn’t capturing quality, good-fit leads
- You sell to larger enterprise customers, but your product marketing team struggles to get them to go on the record or gain story approval from legal
- Sales constantly asks product marketing for more specific customer stories in the verticals they want to break into so they don’t have to keep using the same three generic, heavily-edited case studies
In each of these scenarios (along with a host of other GTM issues), you need to rebuild trust with your prospects. But you don’t do that by handpicking the shiniest quotes from your happiest users. Buyers can sniff inauthentic (and manufactured) customer proof from a mile away.
Customer evidence is a powerhouse to help you become an industry thought leader and set apart your product as the solution prospects have been looking for.
But is it worth the time?
Maybe you’re thinking all this sounds good in theory but getting heart palpitations thinking about what it looks like in practice.
Because, let’s be honest: all of this can take up a lot of resources, if you’re not careful.
You have to audit your existing content, collect new evidence, curate the evidence in a way that’s most helpful for your various GTM teams, and then figure out the best way to share that evidence consistently and broadly.
Who has the time?
That’s the objection we’re here to address. Solving the customer evidence problem can’t be a haphazard undertaking: you need a consistent, easy-to-maintain workflow.
If you’re looking to start implementing evidence-based marketing, a customer evidence platform is the best tool to build it into your strategy at scale.
How do you implement customer evidence across channels?
Ready to put customer evidence to work? Let’s break down the three levels of implementation and how to tackle them.
Level 1: Collect evidence
Start by gathering customer evidence, ideally with a focus on the content or output you want to create. This isn’t just grabbing whatever quotes or testimonials you can find — it requires a more in-depth collection method like surveying.
The simple version here would be to survey your customers at random — for example, when you plan to create an annual report. A more advanced approach is to implement programmatic surveying, like using an always-on cadence. This means you gather feedback or insights from your customers at key milestones throughout their lifecycle.
- After they sign the initial contract
- Once they finish onboarding
- Approaching renewal conversations
- Moments of value within the product
Always-on surveying creates a continuous stream of customer feedback, collected when your questions are timely and most relevant throughout the customer journey.
Whether you’re sending a single survey or multiple surveys, design your questions to map back to your messaging and positioning in a granular way. Then, when it comes time to curate and share your evidence, you’ll have the responses you need for an ideal output.
Level 2: Curate evidence
Next, it’s time to sort through your newly acquired customer evidence and pick the best proof points.
This is often the most time-consuming part of the job — sifting through and finding the good stuff just takes so much time. Marketers often leave gold on the cutting room floor simply because the clock runs out. A customer evidence platform makes this part of the process much easier.
If you’re early stage and don’t have a massive customer base, you won’t have as many responses to choose from. So v1 of evidence curation might look like manually choosing a survey response to use as a quote on your website or in your sales deck.
On the advanced side, you can set up an internal collection of testimonials, use cases, and product stats on why your customers prefer using your product over your direct competitor..
For instance, the UserEvidence platform lets you share and filter customer evidence by industry, company size, and product used. Your team can search and filter for relevant and ready-to-go assets as they need. It automatically sorts responses by sentiment to help you find the good stuff faster.
With ongoing programmatic surveying, you can build a library large enough to tag and organize your customer evidence so each site is highly relevant to a specific audience. You can even tag evidence based on key criteria like industry, use case, company size, and more.
Level 3: Share evidence
The best customer evidence on the planet is meaningless if you don’t have a plan to get it into prospects’ or customers’ hands. Start by equipping your team with assets.
The simpler approach here is pretty straightforward: Tell your sales team you have quotes, stories, or industry-proof points available to use as customer evidence. Then simply send the exported assets or a link to the collections you’ve created.
As you collect and curate more data and assets over time, you can start to take a more advanced approach: creating hyper-focused collections of customer evidence (microsites, if you will), complete with evidence for specific industries, products, or competitors.
At this stage, you should also go beyond testimonial quotes: ROI measures and other metrics for specific personas and business needs (based on something like jobs to be done) will be critical. Finally, this approach takes format into account: you provide a mixture of long- and short-form content designed to be used by sales in deals, marketing in paid campaigns, and other GTM teammates in their roles.
Here are a few tips to do this well:
- Integrate customer evidence into your sales enablement and training platforms like Seismic or Highspot. Then, your team can build the content into outbound sales sequences. They can even create persona-specific campaigns if you’ve curated and organized the content based on each subset of your audience
- Don’t limit your customer evidence training efforts to the sales team — activate the content across all your customer-facing teams. Make sure demand gen, customer success, and social media teams also know how to use the assets consistently. For example, demand gen could use them in paid ads or high-conversion landing pages. And the social team could use them as the basis of campaigns
- Focus on where and how you’ll share customer evidence. Deconstruct evidence into a variety of lengths and formats so you can share it via different channels, from social and ads to blogs and emails. On-brand creative automation is your best friend here — our platform helps you keep assets on brand and user-friendly for any given channel
Start simple and let your efforts grow more advanced and in-depth over time. You’ll see how customer evidence plays a major role (and offer major benefits) across the entire go-to-market funnel.
Elevate your messaging and brand with customer evidence
If you’ve been living in the status quo of cookie-cutter case studies and bland quotes, beginning to implement customer evidence might seem like you’re starting from square one.
But here’s some good news.
You already have a vastly underused asset in your arsenal: hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of happy users. Start tapping into their insights — both their product intel and industry feedback — to build a powerful customer evidence engine.
Need a boost to get those efforts off the ground and implement them at scale?
We’ve got you covered — a customer evidence platform helps you gather, curate, and share the evidence that seals the deal for your audience. Let’s talk.
