[00:00:00] **Ty:**
I think that humans love a good story. A good story involves conflict, and a good story involves a hero. You have to pretty quickly lay out the dilemma and the conflict that a customer is facing, offer up a hero and some supporting cast, and send them on the journey.
How do they get from rock bottom to a better place? What does that look like in the future?
[00:00:32] **Sam:**
Welcome to the State of Customer Storytelling podcast, brought to you by Testimonial Hero. This is the podcast that is all about helping you, as a B2B marketing leader, get the download on the most current practices and tactics related to customer storytelling, so you can make customer stories your competitive advantage, and hit your marketing goals faster.
My guest today is Ty Magnin. Ty is the Director of Marketing Content and Web at UiPath. UiPath is the fastest growing enterprise software company of all time and recently went public.
Before that, Ty helped start and scale Appcues, which is a SaaS for product-led growth teams. Ty was also the first marketer at WorkMarket, where he helped scale them from $250K to $8 million in ARR.
Ty, welcome to the show.
[00:01:30] **Ty:**
Pleased to be here, Sam. Hello everybody.
[00:01:34] **Sam:**
Awesome. Well, let’s just kick it off and let’s talk about what’s the big deal about customer stories, particularly in B2B. Why do customer stories really matter, especially more than ever?
[00:01:48] **Ty:**
I got two bullets on that. Whenever I think about case studies and customer stories, I draw a line back to Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence. Do you know the book?
[00:02:00] **Sam:**
I do, Yeah.
[00:02:02] **Ty:**
A classic. Great marketing book. For those listening that haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend it. One of the chapters in Cialdini’s Influence is about social proof. He talks about the power of social proof and convincing humans to get on board, and get on the bandwagon.
Humans are social animals more than any other. Humans are wired to digest stories and make meaning out of those. I think of case studies and customer stories, all the bits of customer evidence, as being those nuggets you can use to support all the claims.
That’s bullet one. Number two, I think everyone’s bullshit meter is so high now. You see so much stuff online, and there’s fake news, anyone can claim anything, and logos don’t mean that much on a homepage.
I feel like people throw logos on a homepage. Someone at Gmail signs up for a product trial and, they’re like, “Oh, Google is a customer!” They’re stretching the truth a little, sometimes. Most companies are legit.
But anyways, bullshit meters are high. You can’t fake having someone hop on camera, or write a case study about their success with your product.
I think it’s almost like the next best thing to having someone you trust in your network giving you a referral. It is like that, but as scale.
[00:03:52] **Sam:**
Hmm. I I love that you brought that up and it’s true. you know, the, the power of just because everyone has a great logo rack these days, by definition, the game has evolved.
That’s just table stakes. It’s not Like, it. Like, it’s just, it’s not enough. And, you brought up video there, which is, is, such a good point. Like what’s, in your opinion, like what’s unique about, you know, video in the customer evidence mix.
[00:04:22] **Ty:**
First, I love that you said logo wreck. I’ve never heard that term before, but it is like, you just have a rack of logos and you pull them off sometimes. That’s so good. why video? Well, there was a study that was popularized amongst website or tech marketers, probably.
I don’t know, a dozen years ago, maybe just like sick. That just seemed to go viral. I can’t remember now, but it was about how faces, are scientifically proven to build trust. Right. so if you put someone’s face on a landing page, better yet a quote, people are going to convert at a higher rate. So I think when you think about, okay, static images of faces work well, no.
What is the next level up from that? Video’s like obviously the dominant, most powerful, most information-rich medium we have today. I mean, someone’s probably gonna argue with me, but like it’s the dominant one. Let’s be real. So, yeah, if you want to condense as much trust points as possible somewhere, I think you do a customer case study.
[00:05:34] **Sam:**
Yeah. when you said video’s the most dominant media, I immediately thought, okay, maybe the future, the next product we’ll watch eventually it will be the metaverse reference call. We hop in, we put on our goggles meet the reference in, in person, in the metaverse. But yeah, that’s, that’s a whole other podcast, but I love, I I love the point that you brought up there that there’s just like the.
I, I like the term, the trust index. I don’t know if that’s a term, but like let’s, just, you know, coin it here on the podcast. the trust index with video is so high compared to a static text, because exactly, like you said, you can actually, you know, evaluate people’s face.
You can, you tell if they’re enthusiastic, you can’t get that tone, even if it’s a great quote, even if it’s a great written case. study you just can’t get that tone through text.
[00:06:24] **Ty:**
No, there’s so much more dimension, You’re hearing their voice and the sound of their excitement. You’re getting, I guess, what do we do for frames per second? These days 30? I don’t know. You tell me.
[00:06:34] **Sam:**
Yeah. Typically 30.
[00:06:36] **Ty:**
Yeah. So you’re getting 30 pictures in a second instead of one. there’s obviously a lot more dimension and depth to it.
Super high on the trust index.
[00:06:46] **Sam:**
And, how have you seen, I guess customer evidence, you know, change and customer stories change over, over the course of your career. have there been any curious, Like have you noticed any trends? obviously more video because that’s a macro trend, but other than that, what have you seen in the past, I guess, you know, decade that you’ve been, at the forefront of, B2B software marketing specifically.
[00:07:15] **Ty:**
Good question. It’s a good one. back in my day, We’re talking 10 years ago, when I started doing marketing for B2B case customer evidence was limited pretty much to single-page PDF docs that people might literally print or more likely attach to an email to someone. it was always formatted as a three-act story.
So it’s not bad. I’m not knocking this, but it was always the problem, the solution, the result. And you have to have numbers in the results. section, now? I think teams have gotten so much more creative about it. you know, the, the format. Can be like, Take that problem solution result okay, that’s the story, The customer story. you can put it into many, many formats. It can be little, in their kind of created, purposefully depending on the distribution channel or, so for, if you’re talking about how can I get this customer story onto Twitter now? You’re looking at probably. A quote or the good little video snippet, maybe it was like, Hey, here’s one of the keynotes from our event.
Here’s a 30-second snippet and click to see the whole talk. so little snack-sized nuggets then of course we talked about the logo rack earlier. That’s another form of customer evidence, that probably came into, I’m sure that’s been on web for the predates me. some interesting things are long-form customer, evidence, samples.
You get someone to do a webinar with you. That’s long-form customer evidence. They’re talking about their story or keynote. those probably aren’t that new either, so they I’m struggling to find them. but I’m trying saying, what do you have? You, you pay more attention to space than I do.
[00:09:07] **Sam:**
Well, I actually, I really liked your point about long-form customer evidence. because to me the biggest trend is that it’s, the whole, you know, customer stories, customer evidence have really moved. Throughout the whole customer journey. Right. And like, I think it used to be, for sure, they’ve become increasingly video so that what you, exactly, everything you said aligns with that, because it’s like, okay, it’s no longer that attachment at the end of the sales cycle you share, you know, or, you know, it’s, it’s really, early in the buyer journey, they might see a short snackable clip of your customer.
It’s very high-level talking about maybe the pain. and then, you know, as the, there’s just, I think more of just like a focus on, mapping the whole buyer journey and then thinking about, okay, what are the questions prospects have at every stage of the buyer journey? And how can we answer that?
Of course you could answer it from your sales person. You can answer it from your marketing team, but I think the best companies Like you guys are increasingly, thinking, Hey, how can we answer this from our customers? Because coming back to your point about influence it’s just so much more credible.
[00:10:26] **Ty:**
Yeah, you’ve got to back it up with evidence. a couple other forms of how evidence has evolved. that I was just thinking of as you were talking, Ratings and review sites, right? 10 years ago, it certainly wasn’t a thing maybe we started to have five star-ratings on eBay or Amazon.
But those were still early days. now we’ve seen that be applied to B2B, which is unique. there’s this more community-oriented a little bit more objective, I guess. process to giving customer evidence in the form of These G2 crowd sites Trustpilot or what have you, what do you make of those?
[00:11:11] **Sam:**
That’s a great point. I think that it’s really kind of the, a lot of, the consumerization of B2B in a lot of respects, like, you said, we saw, you know, Amazon. doing that. then a lot of good things that work get started first in consumer, And then they make their way over to B2B. that’s, what we’re seeing now, I’m really curious where that’s going, because just like logo, racks, it’s almost like we’re not there yet, but like with certain sites, It’s almost getting to the point of like, when you go on Amazon right now you’re like, yeah, every product has a five-star review.
Obviously almost once a tactic that gets so used, it can get abused. Right. And then like, I’m not sure what the solution is, but also it opens up new opportuniTys. with like, you know, there’s, there’s G2 and I think G2 is great in many respects Then there’s also TrustRadius they have like a different take on reviews which I think kind of is meant to, you know, combat, maybe some of the issues with G2 around, they’re just more verified or more whatever. but yeah, I think it it’s, at a macro it’s it’s that consumerization of B2B, factor.
[00:12:33] **Ty:**
Yeah. Interesting. And people are sort of, I mean, reviews are an important part of the buying process.
[00:12:38] **Sam:**
Yeah, well, I think, well, the other thing with reviews is, I think reviews can be a great. Point for a lot of companies to start sort of mining for who to feature in their more, in-depth, customer evidence, right? Cause like, it always say it might only take five minutes to write a review and you know, if someone writes an amazing review.
You know, that might be a good, you know, way to figure out, Hey, who are my happiest customers who would actually do something more in depth, like a video testimonial, right. Which is going to require a little bit more, commitment. But speaking of, you know, video testimonials and such, I wanted to ask you a little bit about, you know, the content and web side of.
Your case studies page. So like, the, on the, on the UiPath site. So if anyone has listened to this, I think UiPath has a great, example of, of a customers page. if you go to uipath.com/customers they will redirect. but basically you guys have, you know, a. Really robust filtering system.
And because you have so many customer stories, so much customer evidence, 13 or so pages of it. Can you tell me a little bit, I’d love to hear more, like, how do you think about that? And, yeah, let’s just talk about that page. Like, how do you think about the role, of the page and how did you, why is it the way it is?
Because I think it’s a really stellar example. Of something that a prospect can really self-serve, they can filter and find exactly what they want.
It’s very segmented, which is very unique. And, and to me represents the future you know, AR or to me is very in line with the future of, of how buyers buy, which is more self-service
[00:14:28] **Ty:**
Yeah. Well, thank you. That’s a big compliment. we’re actually in the middle of redesigning this page and, and I think we’re only adding more filters, which again is a Testament to how big the body of work there is, which is a result of having many people at UiPath enabled to work with customers to document their stories we have regional workers that are actually the ones writing these stories now often with help from an agency or a writer. not all of them have the best English actually. So they are, identifying the best customers in their market. them down to document their story. Sometimes they have them on a webinar and write the case study once ready, they are enabled to queue it up, to get published inside of our resource center, which has a page dedicated to case studies. So the case study library does have filters for region. It has filters for products for new multiple products. It has filters for topics. Oh, and it will, or does, I’m thinking more about the new design, have filters for industries and departments. in total we’ve got over, you know, we’ve got maybe 200 case studies, and we think okay, you have 200, that’s a lot.
If someone like a sales person or a marketer is not going to spoonfeed you, the ones that are most relevant to you. How can we make it easy for someone to find them themselves? so we’ve looked at different dimensions that are aligned to our go-to-market motions, and we’ve enabled people to explore all content or at least these, these case studies in particular, on those dimensions.
So one of our go-to-market motions that’s really important at UiPath as with many other companies is like a solutions. And, and the solutions motion, we are basically creating a story, you know, messaging. we might have unique customer evidence and, even like a bundle of products or partners for a given industry, right.
Banking and finance or insurance, or for a different department. HR legal. It that’s one dimension. Another one could be products, right? Someone is interested in our process mining products. Okay. Because they’re already a customer and they actually want to expand usage. they can look at all case studies of other customers that have used process mining in their journey. and the other one is region, right? Some people just want to know who are the other customers who are, you know, in. My area that have had success with my path.
[00:17:24] **Sam:**
That makes a ton of sense. And it reminds me of this kind of stat that I believe that. You know, 70% of the sales process has already, you know, happened before buyers speak to a sales representative with that in mind, the next question is, how can we enable buyers to self-serve? I think that’s a great example.
And, for folks listening, I think we’re saying case studies, but it’s worth noting that a lot of these case studies are not just texts they’re also video case studies and the ones that are just. I have incredible original photography, in many cases. So like, not just like a stock photo, right?
Like real photos from, you know, just amazing photography. And that is one thing. I, and actually I’ll ask you about that is like, in those cases like that, it is just a written case study. In your opinion, like how do you, or how do you think about like, kind of just making it more engaging, right. from like a format or a content perspective.
[00:18:25] **Ty:**
I think that humans love a good story, a good story involves conflict and a good story. involves a hero. so I think you have to pretty quickly like lay out the dilemma and the conflict that a customer was facing, offer up a hero and some supporting cast and send them on the journey.
How do they get from, rock-bottom to a better place. you know, sort of, what does that look like in the future? that’s big, to bring customer evidence to life you need, I mean, ideally it is. a video photos and logos. they’re not all just the same, person’s headshot in an office, I want to get to know that person a little bit more. there’s this notion in storytelling and filmmaking that, you have to make your main character, your hero likable. the, example I always learned that stuck with me in film school was, this guy could be the most unlikable, miserable person on earth, like in like maybe in the minions, the evil villain.
He goes home he has a fish and he feeds the fish And talks to him And all of a sudden you’re like, oh, this is a likable person. and you’re rooting for him. so, so I think. All those things matters to sustain someone’s attention. The, the, the imagery matters to bring it to life and make it feel like unique and real. otherwise your bullshit meter goes off. Did the marketing team just write this? And the person signed off? it’s so different when you can see that person, you know, kind of partaking in the process.
[00:20:01] **Sam:**
That’s yeah, it’s such a, such a good point. And, for someone, listening to this. That, they don’t have 13 pages of, you know, 200 case studies yet. And maybe they’re just getting started.
What tips would you give them around? how to set a strategy? You mentioned, aligning with your, kind of go-to-market initiatives or your go-to-market motion.
Is that yeah. is that where the strategy stems from, or how do you. set a strategy for your. Customer evidence program,
[00:20:37] **Ty:**
It’s a big question. If I were to rewrite it right now, for someone that’s just getting started, it would be a lot different than what we’re doing in enterprise scale. if you’re just getting started, I would think about what are the. most Impactful places for you to incorporate customer evidence, to have them either back up some important claim or tell your story for you And I will go there. It’s probably your homepage and some product pages. that’s how we did things at app queues. Like we, we wanted to get a quote that included ROI from customers about each feature or. product so we started with that as a goal and that was achieved we didn’t even worry about the whole case study we just wanted a quote, you know, as you scale up from there, you have to think about all the different kinds of customer evidence.
You have to think about permissions where you store the signatures and how long the shelf life of customer evidence should be. You need a system of record for all that, for us in salesforce.com, that’s where all the customer data is anyway. then you had to figure out, what teams are in charge what’s the process who can reach out to the customer and who can’t.
You have to figure out what stories you want to keep for your, you know, annual event. And you don’t want to spoil them on something lesser. Then, if you do it for the annual event, how do you break that into nuggets make it into a case study? get it on Twitter and LinkedIn and all those things.
So it gets much more complex. as you grow older or bigger, I should say.
[00:22:12] **Sam:**
For sure. And, and that’s the goal, right? Hopefully as all of our companies are growing older, they’re, they’re growing bigger. In most cases, I love that you brought up the annual events, something you guys have done a lot of.
Do you mean like in that instance, like the reveal is the live, like the customer. speaking in like a keynote situation or is it a video review via like our guests? It could be either, but how does it work for you guys?
[00:22:38] **Ty:**
So for us, we want to have a few keynote stories that are basically the customers talking about their grand vision or grand successes with UiPath. so if you were to go to one of our events, you know, we just did forward for, in Las Vegas in October. big success. You would see a few of those stories, like, you know, those headlines get extrapolated upon onstage. just the same movie where like revealing our products. Right. And that’s also, you know, with that, we might go to press and have those stories told and certain publications that our audience is interested in, or, you know, it could be who knows for lucky it’s wall street journal or Forbes. And then some of the smaller stories yet, they’re not going to make big headlines and maybe they actually have participated in a webinar or done a case study with us throughout the year. And we thought, man, these are so good. Let’s bring them live. What’s going to move in front of a bigger audience. and so it’s sort of the reverse motion of that.
[00:23:36] **Sam:**
And I imagine you can still capture those keynotes on video and then, you know, slice and dice create a snackable micro content as well. Is that also, is that.
[00:23:47] **Ty:**
Yes, we do that. That content goes on social, right? Because if it’s a 22nd clip, it is perfect for like a little Twitter and Instagram story or what have you, but they can also be embedded into the case studies, to help again, bring that story to life, especially if we’re going to write that case to based on the talk, given at the conference.
[00:24:06] **Sam:**
I want to circle back to something you kind of hit on earlier around like empowering your regional marketers to Asked, you know, be involved.
I think that’s something that is, you know, I think making the ask is sometimes challenging. And, actually even before making the ask, it’s like knowing who to ask, right?
Like how do you guys figure out who you want to actually ask to, to sort of, to feature in the, in one of these customer store?
[00:24:35] **Ty:**
So we originally had customer evidence as a program that was managed in a central area of a global marketing team. that was one thing that I was focused on when starting at UiPath. we decided after a year of that, after we started getting kind of the case study and the customer program going that it wasn’t the best, like managing it all centrally.
Wasn’t the best practice. having like one person look at all of these things and write all these and interview all the customers, was a bit of a bottleneck. And, you know, we have marketers in all of our regions who are pretty capable, right. They’re also talented in their own ways and can often write a good taste study.
They also are the ones that have these relationships with the. customers and they’re the ones that will do the webinars and promote them in their region. So we decided to a federate case study production. and in doing that, we created guidelines about how, you know, a case study should be created, how a customer story slides should be created, all those things and distributed those and sort of made ourselves a bit more of a, center of excellence, I guess like, like someone that could. Help and kind of own the standard and make sure that these things were globalized or standardized, I should say, but less about turning the wheels every day. so that’s how things have evolved.
[00:26:00] **Sam:**
That makes a lot of sense. So, you know, sort of phone foam market listening to this at a larger company, it’s totally possible to kind of decentralize that as long as you have the right, you know, guidelines in place, the right, you know, style guides, the right kind of processes. To, you know, make sure everyone is on the same page.
What about actually, like, you know, making the ask to the extent I don’t, you know, that you’ve been involved in those asks? Cause it sounds like it might’ve been, maybe it’s more of the local and regional people, but How do you, you can go about making ask of a customer, right?
So they actually say yes, right. Or like, cause that’s, I think. something that we all have to deal with is like, we want to ask the customer in the best way possible. So they agree to participate.
[00:26:47] **Ty:**
Yeah. Making the ask. We were crossing over each other too often when we were a centralized team doing this because the regions also had relationships with customers and they would, they make their own asks. Hey, can you make this referral phone call? Will you show up to our local event next?
And then the global team saying, Hey, we heard the good things. Can you do a case study? Can we use a logo? Now? They’re just getting asked from all these different people, right? And it’s, it is messy. It’s a bad customer experience and we haven’t prioritized or bundled those asks. So that’s not the right way to do it.
We’ve moved since to have our regional marketers owning those relationships. And therefore controlling the asks and filtering it too, right? Hey, listen. They just had a bad week. This is not a good time to ask or, Hey, listen, this company is trying to negotiate. We have a good opportunity to make an ask here.
How do they go about it? Honestly, at this I don’t, I don’t know how it works today. I think they just like work with the sales person and have a good relationship. And, you know, oftentimes it’s expected or it comes up on a sales call or in negotiations, I think it can happen so many different ways.
[00:27:56] **Sam:**
I love that you brought up negotiation and sales because you know, that is I think a good point. Cause a lot of, customer marketers, you know, marketing teams, sometimes forget that like often the salesperson, even though they haven’t maybe spoken with the customer in a while, They’ve gone through the sales process together, they formed a close bond in relationship in that process or else the sale wouldn’t have closed.
Right. So that’s a good point that, Hey, you can bring in sales and be, like agreeing to participate in those marketing activiTys can be a really good, negotiation. in negotiations, right. It’s like, okay. You know, maybe we’re willing to, you know, do XYZ if you are willing to, you know, pending satisfaction of course, like agree to, XYZ, you know, marketing activity, whether it’s like, a webinar, speaking out at your event and, or the video testimonial.
[00:28:50] **Ty:**
Yeah. And the interesting part, of where we are in our own journey with customer evidence is, is where we are today, which is trying to figure out, the refreshing in the retiring of customer evidence, right? Not all of them. Customers. Like, we didn’t always agree to like, Hey, can we use this for the next 24 and a half months?
You know, it sort sorta just like, yeah, go and use it. That’s fine. but now I’m sort of regretting not setting that up from the beginning of like, Hey, we’re going to keep this for three years. And then after that, like, we’ll ask again or we’ll retire it. W we don’t have a solid strategy on it? now, w we actually just set up a retirement program to look at all of these after 30 months, two and a half years, and basically defaulting to retire, but, ideally refreshing the ones, that exists that are still getting traffic that are, you know, on the 13th page of our case study library.
What do you know about this Sam? Like how should companies. How long is an appropriate shelf life for customer story. How do they manage this part of it?
[00:29:59] **Sam:**
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think it’s sort of, I think a champagne problem in a lot of respects, right? To have so many case studies coming in so quickly that it becomes a problem. so that’s one thing I think is like, honestly, a lot of companies don’t necessarily find themselves in that position, but it, nevertheless, you know, it still is a real, real challenge.
And, in my opinion, I think there’s a couple of factors to think about. is it still relevant to, you know, your strategic narrative and the positioning of the company? Right. And, if in certain companies, as long as you know, your customers okay, to that, you keep featuring them.
Like it could be five years and like Testimony video testimonial is, is still extremely relevant, right? Because the product is still solving a lot of the same problems. Right. But other products they’re growing so, so quickly and becoming, you know, almost a completely new product, you know, every, every year or the strategic narrative has just changed.
And like, it’s a great testimonial, but the vision has gotten much bigger and it’s just no longer relevant. So like, it’s really the, both, there’s like the strategic side for us as marketers. And then there’s the kind of like doing right by the customer side. I find that most customers, you know, are pretty happy to let people keep using the case study.
Now as, as long as certainly if they’re still a customer, that is something that I actually see, like a lot of this is like totally new ground, right? In like customer evidence and in customer marketing, like it’s always been around, but it’s, there’s been many less, specialized roles, like specialized customer marketing has grown so quickly that I think that the sort of best practices are very much still being written.
So, but those are the two things I think about. I was like one do right by the customer and then two, do right, align with your go to market.
[00:31:58] **Ty:**
Yeah. agree in both directions. do you see a piece of customer evidence, like a case study or a video as okay. To keep over time? Because it has a date attached to it. It’s like, Hey, at a certain point customer a was happy with us in this way and was using us in this way or should that always be.
Current, does that make sense? Like, can you call it a time piece, you know, and be like, well, they were happy with us in 2014 and use this this way. Even if you know, they’re not as happy now in using us a different way, not doing right by the customer. Do you understand why dilemma.
[00:32:38] **Sam:**
Yeah, it’s a really great, great question. another thing I would say is a really differs a lot by the size, like the size of your company, right? the size of, the co the company that’s utilizing the customer evidence. I think there’s a lot, generally speaking. I think there’s a lot more flexibility for like smaller companies who are just like, kind of like, you know, in the startup or growth phase.
There’s a lot, I think more forgiveness, you know, in general. you know, some of those companies are just, they’re going to do whatever they can to, to claw their way up to being, you know, successful. Right. And, I think as a company gets larger, it becomes something that you do have to be more proactive about. And be like, Hey, like it’s been like, you know, X years just want to make sure that you’re still cool with us using this. and I think just like anything it’s like setting the right expectations and good communication go a long way, but yeah, the rules are still being written at, for sure. I think. And it’s a great question.
[00:33:39] **Ty:**
Yeah, it’s just hard to have good communication after three years. Is that person still with the company you immunity case study, you know, three years ago, it’s been up, there is a person still with the company, like is the person who made the case study still with the company, So the contact and the communication may just break after time.
So anyways, there’s a lot of challenges to it.
[00:33:58] **Sam:**
Yeah. I would say like, I think the safe, the safe thing is like, it’s probably like, no, right. If the person leaves the company, they’re no longer with it. like when in doubt, like probably shouldn’t use it. that is, that’s probably like the safe, like the answer, right?
[00:34:13] **Ty:**
Yeah. Yeah. So you can’t say, well, Kevin worked at the company in 2014, so it’s okay to keep up. It just feels a little more, it feels a little naughty, keeping it up in that. So here I have a proposition for you and maybe you’re already building this a Testimonial Hero, but there’s gotta be a pretty simple database, right.
Of customer evidence That could connect with something like LinkedIn to see if that person is still at the company and good connect with like Salesforce to see if the company is still accustomed. Right. And, and, and maybe even connect with your website. So you know where you’ve used this? evidence, that would solve a lot of our problems around expiration.
That same database might also be the thing for you to track. Did you reach out to them? What did you ask for them to, to do to this? Yes. Or they say no, like, does this tool exist? Am I just missing the boat? Could this be something we built together and make billions.
[00:35:12] **Sam:**
Yeah, it’s a, it’s a great question. So the only tools, so I know of a couple of tools, I don’t know, like the full feature set of them, but, slap five who we’ve had, we’ve had, Jeff, the CEO of slap five on the. They do a lot in this space. I don’t know their specific feature set, but, it could have to do, I think it might have to do with some of this crowd advocate is another one I’m aware of.
And then there’s also Orca force is something that I just came across. That’s pretty interesting. It is basically like a Salesforce extended. it’s a Salesforce app. four customer evidence in customer reference management. so that I think, you know, that lives within Salesforce.
Right? So I think that is, that is, I think really interesting in it, to my extent, like, if, if you or any of the listeners want something that’s like within your Salesforce instance, You can do all of this within the tool you’re already using. As far as I know, Orca forest is the only tool out there, that you can just get from the Salesforce lightning store, right?
Yeah. Yeah, that’s correct. And we’ll put the link in the show notes for the listener. I think it’s Orca force.co. and yeah, we’ll, we’ll make sure to include that in the show notes, but I know we’re coming up on time here. So one last question for you Tai and like, I guess if you had to kind of sum it up, like if someone’s out there and they, they feel like they want to do more with customer evidence, they may be like, they want to catch up.
Like, where, where can they start? Like, what advice would you give to someone who’s like, okay, I want to take this seriously. I believe in the power of customer evidence as a true competitive advantage. we’re probably, maybe they’re a little behind right now, or they’re just like, you know, kind of average, like how can they get started and make, you know, customer evidence like a true competitive advantage for them?
[00:37:07] **Ty:**
So here’s some. If you can’t easily create some customer evidence with the relationships that you have with your customers, you are not doing your job as a marketer. You should have customers. You’re talking to all freaking time, right. That you’re buddies with even. so that’s a big red flag, right? what is keeping you from getting to know the customers? Like the reason can’t be good enough for you, not to get into no. so, so number one, get close, you know, hanging out with, take them to lunch, whatever that’ll make it a hell of a lot easier when you actually want to turn a relationship into evidence. if you have the relationship and you haven’t created the evidence again, I go back to what are the highest impact places? For you to feature that evidence and make it pull weight for you, right? Maybe it’s doing one big webinar because you only do one big campaigning thing a month. Maybe it’s putting that quote that you finally got on your homepage or emailing out the case, study to your entire database.
Cause it’s just that good. yeah, I would say start with that one thing and then just follow it. If it works double down, if not, maybe try a different format, maybe have a huge Twitter audience. How can you make something unique for them? I do, I do.
[00:38:27] **Sam:**
I love it. I think that’s perfect. You know, it’s talk to customers, right? It’s an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the saying goes. An ounce of real relationship is worth a pound of strategy and tactics. I think that’s such a good point.
So Ty, for anyone who wants to connect with you, where can people get in touch with you if they want to connect and learn more?
[00:38:53] **Ty:**
Twitter’s great. I’m on Twitter @TyMagnin. You can visit my website, TyMagnin.com, too. If you want to see a little bit more about me or some of the writing that I’ve done, that’s the best place. I’m in San Diego. So, if you’re ever in this direction, hit me up.
[00:39:16] **Sam:**
Love it. Love it. Awesome, man.
Well, thanks for coming on. Always good to chat.
[00:39:20] **Ty:**
Likewise. Thanks for having me.
[00:39:22] **Sam:**
Alright, folks. That was another awesome episode of the State of Customer Storytelling with, Ty Magnin.
A couple key highlights I want to underscore, Influence, by Robert Cialdini. Amazing book, social proof, a must-read, Ty mentioned that. The power of video, you can’t fake someone hopping on camera, at least for now. Deep fakes are coming. Maybe that’ll be a whole new episode.
Long-form customer evidence, like keynotes, like webinars, is such a good example of a video format that’s actually long-form. Maybe it’s further down the funnel. We talked about aligning with your go-to-market motion, and empowering local teams to find those stories.
At the end of the day though, none of it really matters, and all of it becomes so much easier if you actually know customers. The best tactics are only going to get you so far if you don’t have that close relationship and that real relationship, and that honest relationship that just comes from a place of genuinely wanting to know the customers.
So, a great reminder. Everyone’s busy, but it’s just something that you gotta do. You gotta take the time and build those real relationships.
This has been the State of Customer Storytelling. I’m Sam Shepler from Testimonial Hero, and we hope to see you in the next episode.
