When experts make critical decisions in the scientific and medical fields, they rely on studies with rigorous methodologies. They set up experiments that capture statistically significant evidence to support their conclusions. All this results in life-saving medications and scientific advancement.
Software decisions aren’t exactly life or death — but the best solutions resolve real pain for their customers, so these purchases are still pretty damn important decisions.
Why do vendors think it’s enough to offer buyers two or three hand-curated (and often overly polished) case studies and call it a day?
Vendors that reduce the risk for their potential customers by providing solid and substantive evidence will:
- Shorten their sales cycle
- Win more deals
- Build more trust as a brand
This is where customer evidence shines. Moving forward, the difference maker for software companies is credible, verifiable evidence that proves their product is better than the alternatives. That’s why our product vision has evolved and we’re building a customer evidence platform at UserEvidence.
Here’s more about the shift we’re making and why.
A customer voice platform wasn’t enough
We announced our Series A raise and our charge to build a customer voice platform. But as we talked to our customers and observed the market, we realized that the voice of the customer (VOC) was too broad for what we were doing.
As a concept, VOC creeps into areas like product insights, user interviews, customer experience (CX) tools, or NPS capture — these are all crowded spaces dominated by low-cost tools. Customer evidence still relies on VOC, but it extends far beyond key quotes and your NPS.
Here’s how we define it: Customer evidence is believable, trustworthy, and substantiated proof from your end product users.
The shift from a customer voice platform to a customer evidence platform now means we’re refining our priorities.
We’ve seen that there’s still a lot of work to do to help GTM teams build credibility — from first-touch to closed/won — by showing relevant, substantive evidence that goes beyond reviews and social proof.
Content teams need to build authority, product marketers need to back up big claims, and sales teams need to make a clear, relevant business case.
When we say evidence, we mean it. Our platform sources and verifies proof points directly from your customer base, meaning when you see the UserEvidence logo or mark, you know it’s been checked and is trustworthy.
Rigorous decision-making is woefully lacking in B2B tech
If you’ve been in the buyer’s seat for B2B software, I’d wager that you’ve seen your fair share of overlypolished case studies and handpicked testimonials from vendors.
You likely also sensed that these materials weren’t telling the whole story.
Maybe they only featured cookie-cutter, generic quotes with minimal substance and limited use cases — so they felt too good to be true. Perhaps the customers highlighted were from a different industry or used the product to solve a different problem than the one you had.
Did you feel confident and ready to buy after reading this “proof”? Yeah, didn’t think so.
Yet time and time again, vendors rely on the same old ineffective tactics, and they pay the price for it.
Plenty of organizations shell out six figures to analysts to interview a small handful of customers and produce an “ROI study” full of vague or unreliable numbers. (Pst: there is a better way to create research content.)
Others spend months on a case study only to see it watered down in the legal or public relations approval phase, especially if the customer is in a sensitive or highly regulated industry like cybersecurity.
Yet after all that time, budget, and effort, the deliverables can’t hold up to buyer scrutiny because prospects know they’re biased and untrustworthy.
When they sense that something’s off, they might not buy at all. But even if they do buy, the enduring mistrust can still be costly for your brand later on, leading to churn and headaches for your customer success team.
Your audience craves credible proof that makes the buying process easier and more transparent, and customer evidence lets you deliver that.
Customer evidence actually builds trust
We’re throwing our weight behind customer evidence because it’s the best way to prove your product’s value and increase buyer confidence. Here’s why customer evidence is worth the investment.
It’s honest and transparent
One or two hand-selected testimonials or case studies feel misleading, especially when it’s clear they were written by the vendor’s marketing team. A skewed or biased case study can be as bad as no case study at all.
Prospects’ BS detectors are higher than ever, so they’re skeptical of any company-presenting narrative (which often conceals what the customer actually feels).
But specific customer evidence from hundreds (or thousands) of users is way more trustworthy than generic case studies from a handful of customers. Transparent VOC content can be the deal-maker that makes a buyer feel more confident choosing that vendor.
It’s verified by a third-party
In light of widespread buyer skepticism, vendors need to augment highly polished case studies that speak to a single customer’s experience with tangible, data-backed evidence.
In short: you need more verified examples and data from your customer base. It’s much harder to fake conclusions and trends when you have a large sample size that’s independently verified.
Customer evidence does more than just tout the benefits of a product — it proves them with real customers’ ROI, competitive comparisons, feature benefits, and experience of the market.
Evidence from across your customer base shows group consensus and statistical significance to back up your brand’s claims by the numbers, all of which position your company as trustworthy and reliable.
It’s expansive
Pure voice of customer content doesn’t answer all the questions customers have, and it’s usually only suited to the bottom of the sales funnel.
With a customer evidence platform, you can create a wider range of content to support the entire buyer’s journey. This approach helps you collect details that support decision-making throughout the funnel like:
- Purchasing rationale and challenges resolved
- Use cases and product benefits
- Competitive evidence
- Quantitative proof like ROI or time saved
It’s relevant
Too often, product marketers don’t have the time (let alone access to customers) to continually make industry-specific content that meets the sales team’s needs.
The result is the same industry testimonials getting used over and over again. Stories from four years ago get played on repeat like an episode of Friends. And even though everybody knows it’s gone stale, it’s hard to get new or updated content.
Partly because customers in industries like finance, security, or pharmaceuticals might not go on the record or give final approval, regardless of the time and money spent to produce a story..
Our customer evidence platform will help vendors harness the voice of happy users. That way, they can create a huge library of relevant, data-driven content to leverage for any kind of buyer.
Without a platform like this, collecting substantive proof on a large scale is expensive and time-consuming. With it, vendors can efficiently and scalably tackle GTM challenges. This means more closed deals and shorter sales cycles, especially if you:
- Sell to a diverse range of industries, segments, or regions
- Have multiple product lines or use cases to create content around
- Compete in a crowded market and need proof that you’re better
- Need to tell the stories of why customers switched from incumbents or how they chose you over competitors
Customer evidence speaks directly to your potential buyers and shows them you understand the problems they’re facing — and it proves you can solve them.
We’re raising the stakes on customer evidence
We want B2B companies to embrace a whole new approach to backing up their core value proposition and product claims.
With customer evidence, you don’t just claim your solution is better. You have receipts.
You don’t rely on one bland case study to shoulder the burden of sealing the deal with every customer, regardless of who they are. You use specific customer details and data to answer specific objections.
Customer evidence uses a scientific approach to present your product as an empirically validated investment. When you collect evidence using data, analytics, and credible case studies, you build a persuasive narrative that your product can meet the nuanced needs of savvy buyers.
As prospects grow more and more skeptical, backing up your product claims with airtight evidence throughout the customer journey is only going to become more important.
The good news is that most B2B software vendors have a criminally underused asset: their hundreds (or even thousands) of happy customers. All they need to do is prioritize collecting feedback and data at key milestones across the customer lifecycle so they can use that evidence to convince buyers throughout their journey.
The manual approach to this process is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. But with the help of a customer evidence platform, you can gather, curate, and share evidence at scale, and transform your sales cycle along the way.
The future of B2B is built on customer evidence
At UserEvidence, we practice what we preach. A shift like this one came directly from talking to our customers and understanding their needs based on — you guessed it — customer evidence. We’re excited to keep evolving our platform to deliver what B2B companies are looking for and urgently need.
If you’ve been feeling this tension — you know that your buyers need verifiable proof but can’t implement customer evidence at scale on your own — let’s talk. We’re building our platform for teams like yours.
