What's the value of a word...in B2B customer testimonials?
In the case of testimonials from your satisfied customers, a word may be worth its weight in gold.
Of course, it's no secret that B2B customer testimonials influence buying decisions and, in turn, your bottom line.
If your B2B business is not taking advantage of the power of testimonials, then it's time to consider how to implement them into your marketing plan.
But, getting the most out of testimonials means choosing positive reviews that are relevant to your incoming sales prospects. Then placing them strategically throughout your sales funnel.
In this article, we'll give you the essential elements of a great testimonial and where to use them. As well as actionable ways to highlight your customers' success.
Let's get started.
Testimonials are generally a written statement given by your friends, colleagues, employer, or peers.
People give testimonials in appreciation of your work or to endorse a service that was valuable to them in their personal or professional life.
But your business is a slightly different matter.
Your B2B customer testimonials need to resonate with your potential customers in order to be effective.
And whatever claims you make in your marketing should always be backed up by supporting evidence.
Customer testimonials are the perfect means to show your reliability, trustworthiness, and brand advantages to another business.
A good testimonial is:
For instance, here's a great video example from Payara:
In this section, you'll find ten great testimonial examples as well as creative ways to incorporate the strategies showcased within these examples into your marketing strategy.
Sitting in plain view on their blog page, this customer testimonial from Airtable is a brilliant and innovative way to use testimonials to generate leads.
What we like about this customer testimonial example:
Top Tip: Put your B2B customer testimonials in unexpected places and with high-contrast design elements to grab the eye.
Our testimonial example from Canva demonstrates the potential of social media as a tool for business growth.
Look at this tweet from a brand new Canva fan (and retweet from Canva themselves):
What we like about this customer testimonial example:
Top Tip: Monitor your social media channels for opportunities to engage with new or existing customers.
A video testimonial may be the single most effective customer testimonial in your arsenal.
Why?
Videos take B2B customer testimonials to the next level.
Moving images allow a reviewer to connect with their audience in a multifaceted way.
Similarly, video brings facial expressions, hand gestures, voice, tone, and many other important characteristics of communication to the table. All elements that are lacking in a written testimonial.
In only 3 short years, the use of video as a marketing tool has jumped from 63% in 2017 to 85% in 2020.
Due to the increased demand for video content, the importance of introducing video testimonials to grab your buyer's attention has never been more apparent.
Just like any written or quote testimonial, you can use a testimonial video on any page of your company's website.
For example, this video customer testimonial from booking system Robin:
What we like about this customer testimonial example:
Top Tip: Video is an affordable and effective tool for every business. As a result, use it to reveal the reasons your customers choose to support your brand.
To learn more and get help creating your testimonial videos, check out Testimonial Hero.
Zapier has a distinct theme running through its customer social media testimonials. While they frequently use different colors and text, these testimonials all appear in a similar format.
Here's an example:
What we like about this customer testimonial example:
Top Tip: Try including B2B customer testimonials in your top of funnel (TOFU) and social media content to increase brand awareness.
Venngage have managed to combine four brief yet powerful testimonials from industry-recognized customers onto their pricing page:
What we like about this customer testimonial example:
Top Tip: Always use testimonials on any page designed to drive conversions.
Typeform has nailed it with the following testimonial on their product page.
What we like about this customer testimonial example:
Top Tip: Display a mix of familiar faces and logos in your testimonials.
The Webflow homepage includes social proof and B2B customer testimonials directly below the fold.
What we like about these customer testimonial examples:
Top Tip: Instead of confining your reviews to a testimonial page, try placing a customer testimonial video right on your homepage. It's a perfect way to impress new visitors to your site.
Hootsuite does an excellent job of showcasing their customers' successes with a variety of case studies, quotes:
What we like about these customer testimonial examples:
Top Tip: Combine different testimonial formats and designs on the pages dedicated to your customers.
The Kissmetrics' Demo page is one example of how to use a customer testimonial with a call to action.
What we like about this customer testimonial example:
Top Tip: Position your B2B customer testimonials near any CTA.
Video is incredibly popular with all internet users, and it's now used widely for B2B customer testimonials.
The team at Cloudlock found a novel way to use the video testimonial format.
They made "the customer" themselves.
At first, this testimonial example appears to be simple self-promotion. But it's more than that.
Their career page includes this video, which features several Cloudlock employees who describe their experience working at Cloudlock:
What we like about this video testimonial example:
Top Tip: The next time you're hiring, get your team on video to outline your brand strengths, career opportunities, and your working environment.
You've just seen ten great customer testimonial examples to copy on your company's website, social media platforms, and marketing materials.
Every customer testimonial we listed has one thing in common—they are all carefully designed to create an impact and to resonate with potential customers.
Several of our testimonial examples are seldom seen. This means there's an opportunity for you to capitalize on those marketing gaps.
The demonstration page and pricing page options are prime examples of areas that are underutilized by business-to-business service providers.
Video reviews are strong contenders for top place in the list of testimonial examples to copy.
These authentic and concrete examples of your customer's results present you with an opportunity to persuade and connect like no other medium can.
That may just tip the balance when it comes to a decision between you and your competition.
Brokers no longer need to spend hours each week tagging conversations manually and adding notes after each call—ZRA does all that for them.
During customer calls, brokers, salespeople, and customer success agents can easily see AI-generated notes from previous interactions and continue the conversation, whether it involves offering the customer more information about a particular token or solving a simple troubleshooting issue like two-factor authentication.
Using ZRA has streamlined customer processes, from sales to customer service calls to onboarding. “When we go through a customer onboarding process, we need a lot of information from the customer to remain compliant,” Dan explains. “With Zoom Revenue Accelerator, our onboarding team can easily see what’s been collected and what’s missing.”
After each call, ZRA will automatically create a summary and generate a list of the next steps to complete the onboarding. “Our onboarding team can now save time. When engaging with a customer, they can focus and prioritize that customer conversation.”
With automatic, AI-enabled insights into customer calls, Caleb & Brown now uses the intelligence gathered from conversations to guide business decisions. “When we want to start a new customer acquisition campaign or explore a new business line, we have insights into what matters most to our customers,” Dan says. “We can adjust our acquisition strategy and the key messages we use in our comms to match what we see.”
ZRA makes data sharing between teams easier, so brokers can share customer feedback with product and engineering teams—something they couldn’t do easily before. “In the past, it was quite clunky to pull a clip or audio file to share with other teams. Now, they can easily search through transcripts and provide those snippets as text snippets. It’s been a huge improvement to our workflow,” Dan says.
The enhanced collaboration—furthered by the adoption of Zoom Chat and Zoom Meetings—has also improved security. Teams can communicate faster and use ZRA to share data and call recordings to identify bad actors and confirm client identities quickly.
"Our teams can look at the data and make sure the voice and conversation style matches previous conversations. The auto-generated transcript that ZRA provides makes it much easier to search previous conversations." — Dan Johnson, Head of product, Caleb & Brown
In addition to tightening security, ZRA has made it easier for Caleb & Brown to track potential compliance issues and conduct quality assurance.
Along with ZRA, Caleb & Brown adopted Zoom Phone.
As a distributed company with global teams, it was important to ensure that distance didn’t impact customer experience. According to Dan, their previous provider “had significant latency issues and delays in the conversation. It made conversations quite disjointed and felt very unnatural.”
Switching to Zoom Phone solved those issues, and with the seamless integration of ZRA, they’ve gained data analysis capabilities they didn’t have before.
Since they’ve started working with Zoom Phone and ZRA, Caleb & Brown has gathered valuable data from every single customer call. “Previously, only a fraction of those calls were analyzed and reviewed. Now it’s 100%, and our team doesn’t have to do anything—the software does it for us. It’s quite magical,” Dan says.
This analysis has led to significant time savings and given the team a deeper understanding of their customers.
“Understanding those conversations and what topics matter most to our customers at scale has been absolutely phenomenal. We can’t put an exact number on it, but days, months, years of work have been saved.” —Dan Johnson, Head of product, Caleb & Brown
Caleb & Brown have gotten so much value from Zoom Phone and ZRA that they’ve expanded their Zoom ecosystem.
One such integration involves Salesforce. ZRA integrates directly with Salesforce, which means agents no longer have to spend time searching for the information they need. When a customer calls, their profile pops on the screen, allowing agents and brokers to swiftly navigate through that customer's data for additional context for a particular request. “If a customer wants to update their address, for example, the agent can click see and change that information directly in Salesforce. The useability is phenomenal,” Dan says.
Another addition is Zoom Contact Center, which provides a better way for the global support team to service customers. Rather than having support team members to have unique phone numbers, they leverage intelligent routing to streamline call volume through a single phone number. This capability makes reporting much clearer, as it's easier for leadership to understand the types of conversations being had and who is having those conversations.
With so many solutions to offer, Zoom enables Caleb & Brown to improve productivity, know their customers better, and get deeper deal insights to drive more revenue.
“One of the biggest benefits of working with Zoom is their complete product line. Having one provider that you can go to for many solutions makes things quite easy.” —Dan Johnson, Head of product, Caleb & Brown