Customer Proof: Stop Asking Sales to Sell Promises

Testimonials and logos aren't customer proof. Proof is evidence that a customer like this one got the outcome you promised.

Do you have customer success stories for your market segment?

It seems like a simple question. Most companies answer it in seconds. We have testimonials on the website, logos on the sales deck, and a produced case study or two.

That isn't customer proof.

Customer proof is evidence that customers not only bought your product but achieved the outcome you promised. It answers the question the next buyer is actually asking:

Has someone like me solved a problem like mine using this product?

Without that evidence, your claims are still claims, and your salespeople are left selling promises.

Sales should have something easy to sell

Many product managers complain that salespeople make commitments the product can't keep, demand features for one account, and drag the product managers into customer calls to explain the product.

However… are we asking them to sell the wrong thing to the wrong people?

Ideally, salespeople should be selling something customers desperately need. A solution to a significant problem that buyers know they have and are willing to pay to solve.

When those things aren't true, that's not really a sales problem. That's a product management problem: identify markets with problems worth solving and make sure we're building products that solve them.

Even a great product aimed at an important problem isn't enough. Salespeople need tools that help a buyer understand what the product does, how it differs from the alternatives, and why they should believe it will work in their own organization.

That's what we often call “product marketing.”

Product management gives salespeople something worth selling. Product marketing gives them the tools to sell it. Customer proof may be the most important tool in the kit.

What happens when sales teams have no proof

I've learned something interesting from win/loss analysis. Ask people inside your company why they lost a deal and you'll hear two answers: 1. We were too expensive. And 2. We were missing a feature.

Then talk to the buyers, and those explanations evaporate. Price and product are rarely the primary reason for a loss.

More often, the buyer was confused about what the product did, couldn't see how it would solve their problem, or wasn't confident enough to decide and defended the status quo.

Those are enablement problems, not pricing problems.

And without customer proof, salespeople have a critical enablement problem. They can describe what the product will do, but they can't show what it has done.

So the organization compensates. Let's do another demo. Let's bring in the product manager. Let's set up a pilot. Let's get the VP on the call. Let's find a customer willing to take a reference call. Let's build a custom ROI model.

Let’s hit them with more features!

And management wonders why the sales cycle is so long.

Every one of those steps is the company manufacturing proof by hand, one deal at a time, because nobody built it once and made it reusable. That's a custom shop, not a production line. Custom work can be beautiful, but you can't scale it and you can't forecast it.

Buying isn't proof

A customer buying your product proves you convinced at least one buyer to give you money. That's worth knowing. It is not proof of your value proposition.

Stronger proof is that customers actually use the product. Stronger still is evidence that they got an outcome.

Suppose your marketing says the product reduces the time to complete a process. Did it? Don't ask whether the customer is satisfied; satisfaction is an opinion. Find out what they were doing before, what changed after they implemented your product, and what happened as a result.

The best proof follows a simple progression:

Before → Decision → Implementation → Outcome

What was the customer experiencing before? Why did they decide to change? Why did they choose you over the alternatives, including doing nothing? What happened when they implemented it? What measurable improvement occurred?

Now you have something salespeople can use.

Proof for whom?

Here's where it gets interesting. Customer proof has to be relevant to the market you're selling to.

A Fortune 100 success story isn't persuasive to a 200-person company; the reader assumes that customer had a team of twenty and a budget nobody here will approve. A hospital's results don't prove your value to a bank. A technical user's productivity story rarely helps an executive justify the investment.

That's why the question isn't "do we have customer success stories?" It's do we have customer success stories for this market segment?

One success is an anecdote. Several customers with similar problems achieving similar outcomes is evidence that your value proposition is repeatable. That's market evidence, and it's what a segment strategy rests on.

Don't just ask for a testimonial

Product marketing should create customer proof deliberately, as a standing activity. That doesn't mean emailing a happy customer to ask, "Would you give us a quote?"

Have a customer conversation instead. What was happening before you bought? What alternatives did you consider? What made you choose us? What happened during implementation? What changed afterward? How do you know? What's still difficult?

You're after memories of actual experiences, not opinions about your marketing.

Sometimes you'll learn customers value exactly what you expected. Sometimes you'll learn the feature you've promoted for a year barely registers, and they're getting value somewhere you never anticipated. That's useful to product management as well as product marketing.

Close the loop

Customer proof isn't a ceremonial victory lap after a launch. It belongs in the learning loop.

Product management identifies a problem worth solving. Product marketing defines how we'll explain that value. Sales helps individual buyers decide. Customers implement the product and, ideally, achieve the promised outcome.

Then somebody goes back and finds out what actually happened. That evidence improves your positioning, your sales tools, your roadmap, and eventually the product itself.

Here's what to do this week. Take the primary claim on your product page — faster, easier, cheaper, safer, more consistent — and find one customer in your target segment who will say it happened to them. If you can't find one, you've learned something more important than anything on that page.

Before you make another claim about your product, find a customer who will make it for you.

Because if you don't give salespeople proof, they have to sell promises.