Drive pipeline and competitive win rates with customer stories
Overused stats, contextless percentage increases, and me-too marketing claims don't win deals. Stories do.
We create customer story briefs that help sales teams...
Tell a story
Tell a story
Become fluent at telling customer stories across industries and use cases; gain an edge in the war for time and attention
Build trust
Show quick, high-impact examples of how you've helped past customers, instilling confidence in prospects
Stand out from the competition
Show the outcomes enabled by your product and how you out-performed the competition, going beyond raw stats and me-too marketing claims
Enable champions
Send champions high-impact but concise story briefs, made for gaining stakeholder buy-in
Uncover product strengths
Gain a deeper understanding of what drives customer success and use those learnings to close more deals
We create story briefs from A to Z, with proactive communication every step of the way:
- Source customers
- Schedule interviews
- Conduct interviews
- Write copy
- Design
Bonus: We'll create a simple database so your field teams can find story briefs by industry, location, and use case when they're in a hurry.
What is a customer story brief?
Your buyers are buried in questions, but there's one question that rules them all:
Can your prospects trust your product to achieve their desired outcomes?
Story briefs provide a clear and direct answer in a unique, snackable format:
✅ They're easy to read
✅ They make the 'aha moment' pop in seconds
✅ They're easier to remember for sellers and champions
✅ They're made from the ground up to gain stakeholder buy-in
✅ They instill confidence by not hiding behind long, wordy walls of text
How story briefs can actually drive competitive win rates
Customer story briefs are made up of 4 main parts, each one designed to deliver value quickly and help your sales team win deals, especially against competitors.
1) Show immediate value
- We craft a headline that sums up the 'so what?' and holds together everything that follows.
- What is the main takeaway? What brings out the value of your solution and attracts eyeballs? That's your headline.
- Your prospects want the bottom line up front, which gives them a reason to keep reading.
2) Tell a story
- We tell a simple but effective story that's easily scannable and shows progress.
- After a strong headline, we keep eyeballs on the page with your customer's struggle(s) and how they overcame the challenge, using an easily scannable format
- Give your prospects a taste test before they take a bigger bite.
3) Differentiate your product
- Using punchy bullets that you can read in one breath, we explain how you helped a past customer overcome their obstacles and achieve an enviable result.
- Prospects want the juicy details without hunting for them through paragraphs.
- Give them what they want in a simple, easy-to-read format, and they'll give your product an unfair advantage.
4) Build trust
- Lastly, we'll pick one or two customer quotes highlighting why they picked you, surrounding your message with credibility, and the additional color that prospects expect to see.
- A final public endorsement goes further when it supports a broader story that speaks to your prospect's needs in an easily digestible format.
Unforgiving roads often derail customer stories from having sales impact
High-performing sales teams need a robust bank of customer stories to pull from and win over prospects—stories that cover various challenges, goals, use cases, and industries.
But to get there, a treacherous road stands in the way:
- Painful coordination: Someone must own the initiative and play one part creative copywriter and another part project manager. It's challenging, exhausting, and repetitive for anyone to keep up.
- High time cost: Just one story brief takes 6-8 hours to deliver, from identifying customers to gaining approvals to scheduling and conducting interviews to writing and designing the final asset.
- Customers don't always approve public endorsements: Customers aren't always eager to publicize their success. You need to know how to approach your happy customers to maximize your chances of getting approval.
- It's no one's full-time job: Despite their criticality for sales, customer stories are likely 10% of someone's job. Without stories and examples, sales teams are often left without a key ingredient to close deals.
- High financial cost: Outsourcing the creation of assets such as case studies can cost $1,500 and up. The high cost and other challenges above starve sales teams from the resources they need to grow your business.
- Low sales impact: Most customer stories are written with a content marketing mindset rather than a product marketing mindset. They struggle with speaking directly to customer needs and how your product is uniquely positioned to meet those needs.
What you're left with...
❌ Not enough stories: Most B2B sales teams are left to fend with 5-10 customer stories, which were created 1-2 years ago. That's not nearly enough, as markets, customers, and competitors are constantly changing. Plus, prospects want to see more than 1 or 2 examples of success for their use case and/or industry.
❌ Ineffective stories: Plus, most customer stories fall short of going deep enough into struggles faced by the clients and how your product made a unique difference.
❌ Low deal win rates: As your sellers struggle to build credibility and show examples of how you outshine the competition, prospects choose to work with other vendors in your space.
Building a bank of engaging customer stories: a clear path
You could use our framework to create story briefs on your own. Working with us will save your team 6-8 hours per story brief and improve your sales close rate by 20%. Here's how:
We create a system
Rely on us to own the process for your team with frequent updates, and create a simple database that serves as your single source of story briefs across industries and use cases.
We bear the overhead
To publish a story brief, we conduct internal interviews with your team members, create a customer interview guide, source customers, schedule interviews, gain customer approvals, and take care of copy and design.
We interview like you would
We understand the key to building story briefs that tell a clear story and bring out the value of your product: ask the right questions and follow-up questions. That is why our process, which is led by a VP-level product marketing leader, involves extensive background research and documentation, so we can ask the questions you would have.
We gain customer approvals
Story briefs that are approved for publicizing your customer's name, title, and company logo, are infinitely more valuable than anonymized success stories. We know how to ask for customer approval and respond to questions with the highest chance of success. And we free up your team from this time-consuming process.
We have VP-level product marketing experience
We've been creating story briefs for sales teams for over 10 years, which is why we decided to start Proofbite. With our deep experience in product marketing, we know how to interview customers to bring out how your product made a unique difference, and what sets it apart. And we've done it over 200 times over the last decade as we led product marketing teams across Silicon Valley.
Got a question? Send us an email or book a free discovery call.
Ready to get started? Buy a story brief
Build a library of customer stories; drive ROI across your funnel
With Proofbite, you can create a high volume of quality customer stories. Use them to drive growth at every stage of the sales cycle:
Generate leads
Convert a cold audience with stories that speak to your audience's problems, needs, use cases, and industry. Story briefs supply insights and critical content to create blog posts, lead gen assets, landing pages, and ads.
Book meetings with cold prospects
Help SDRs sharpen their account targeting; anticipate prospect needs; equip them with insights to write more effective cold emails; enable them with insightful questions once a prospect responds; develop relationships and land meetings.
Close deals
Give your AEs the tools to establish strong credibility upfront; skip the surface-level discussion and get straight to more strategic conversations; equip AEs with better questions and impactful collateral to move the deal forward and win over the buying committee.
Refine messaging
Use findings from story briefs— demand triggers, goals, obstacles, and results— to refine your marketing message; refine your buyer personas; develop more targeted messaging for specific use cases and industries; learn how to differentiate from competitors.
Got a question? Send us an email or book a free discovery call.
Ready to get started? Buy a story brief