How Qlik amplifies customer voices, shares authentic success stories, and builds meaningful connections

Sales and marketing teams constantly struggle to balance driving immediate results and building long-term customer relationships. At Qlik, we think we do both pretty well.

Founded in 1993, Qlik has grown from a Swedish business intelligence (BI) startup to an international leader in data integration, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML). 

Through acquisitions, steady growth, and innovation, we have evolved into an end-to-end solutions provider that empowers over 40,000+ companies to use data to solve problems and address critical business needs. 

Not enough bandwidth to amplify customer successes

A perk of having such a diverse global customer base is uncovering their diverse experiences and success stories.

As Qlik’s Senior Customer Marketing Manager for the Americas, I’d love to share all of our compelling, cross-industry use cases. But my team doesn’t have the in-house resources to efficiently source customers, schedule (and reschedule) interviews, write, edit and design assets, and usher them through approvals. That would be on top of nurturing customer relationships and identifying customers from our 200,000+-member customer advocate community for speaking engagements, webinars, advocacy programs, advisory boards and other opportunities.

To help craft these stories and expand our capacity, we turned to Testimonial Hero to help us create video testimonials and written customer stories. The Testimonial Hero team creates assets faster and better than we can, leaving us to focus on our core activities.

Making our customers the hero of their own stories 

We start by identifying the customers and stories we want to share and getting their buy-in for the project. From there, the Testimonial Hero team takes over. They schedule interviews, prepare the customer for the interview process, and capture the conversations that they ultimately transform into high-quality, customer-generated content.

We primarily develop first-person customer stories, which are beneficial for a few reasons:

• Writing in the customer’s voice makes them the hero, not us. We can showcase our customer and their ingenuity without sounding too formulaic or shifting the focus to our company. That level of authenticity matters to us.
• They build brand awareness and offer social proof that marketing and sales teams can’t. Having a customer explain how Qlik solved their problem creates a natural connection for other customers and sends a powerful message in a very competitive industry.
• It can be easier to get approvals. Sometimes customers work for a large company or a well-known brand that won’t necessarily allow them to do a traditional case study. First-person content can be a workaround since it’s more subjective and can be attributed to the customer directly.
• The asset becomes a point of pride for our customers, many of whom don’t feel confident writing their own. Testimonial Hero helps them organize, express, and share their ideas, positioning them as thought leaders in data integration and analytics. They share these stories throughout their networks, which they often don’t do with typical case studies.
• First-person success stories can help the sales team close deals faster. It’s hard to measure, but sales reps ask us specifically for first-person stories because they offer the peer-to-peer validation prospects crave. 

Testimonial Hero gives us the capability to offer a variety of stories from different perspectives, industries, and lines of business. The content isn’t just valuable for Qlik but also for the customer, and that’s huge.

Multiplying impact with versatile content

Another reason the stories are so impactful is that Testimonial Hero takes the time to learn about our industry. We share messaging and data around industry trends so they understand the nuances of our business and products. 

Because Testimonial Hero has come to know us so well, it’s an easy decision to leverage their skills during our Qlik Connect annual user conference. We work closely with the Testimonial Hero team to capture the best content from customer presentations. We can get content for up to 12 great first-person stories in just two days by tapping into Testimonial Hero's resources, allowing us to add great value to an event without creating an extra lift for our customers.

As with all of our customer stories, we can repurpose, retool, and remix this content in different ways, such as:

• Posting entire stories and snippets to our website
• Using material in nurture campaigns
• Summarizing assets as snapshots for our sales team
• Adapting interview footage as video testimonials

We can also refresh or update a story to highlight how a customer has expanded their Qlik ecosystem or developed a new use case, giving the content a longer shelf life.

Doing more with a trusted partner

Not all customer marketing departments have the time, energy, or capacity to do everything themselves. Working with a trusted partner who understands your business, who will work to edit and complete a project however you need it, is super invaluable. 

Qlik’s partnership with Testimonial Hero has enabled us to amplify our customers’ voices and boost our marketing output with authentic narratives that connect with existing and prospective customers, drive growth, and showcase innovation. Working with Testimonial Hero will help you get a lot more done. I know it does for me.