Success Stories for Technology Companies: Three Rules for the Perfect Technical Success Story

If you're waiting for your customers to thank you for your technical products and services, you're missing a great marketing opportunity: the success story.

Even the most coherent thank you or testimonial from a customer tells an incomplete story. The specifics of what you did are only partially explained because the customer quite rightly assumes you know all that. In addition, the customer's praise may mislead other customers, referring to a technology by the wrong name, for example, or over-simplifying a breakthrough.

A success story avoids those problems and ensures that you receive the credit you deserve. A success story is under your control because you weave the story you want to tell around the customer's quotes and testimony. In effect, you write your ideal thank you.

Three Requirements for a Great Interview

Great success stories begin with great customer interviews. To gain the most benefit from the interview, you have to: 

• Ask the tough questions. Sometimes "negative" questions produce the most positive answers from customers: What would you change about the product or service? Is there anything you would do differently now?
• Let go of your pre-conceived ideas about your technology products, services and solutions. You may unearth a new use for a product or a new selling point if you let the conversation go wherever the customer wants.
• Put aside the project's history as you recall it. The customer's perception of the problem (and the solution) and the reasons why the customer chose your company may be entirely different from your perception--or even from what the customer originally told you.

The Advantages of Objectivity

Recently I interviewed a long-time customer of a company that designs and builds monitors to keep data centers cool, dry, secure and smoke free. Those monitors successfully protect equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars; every customer has always said so. But this particular customer talked about the value of the monitors for capacity planning. Environmental information from the monitors allowed the company to reconfigure their data center and avoid an expensive move to a larger facility. Because the customer was encouraged to share this information in the interview, the monitoring company discovered a new benefit from their product and an entire new category of potential customers.

The company posted the story on their website, emailed it to potential customers and handed it out at trade shows. When we had several success stories, I wove them together to create a white paper.

Success stories are excellent vehicles for educating your customers. But your first obligation is to tell a story. Avoid writing a success story that sounds like a technical term paper. Keep it relaxed, keep it moving.

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