Customer reference stories are some of the most powerful sales tools in technology sales. Reason is that with reference stories it is possible to a good degree to reduce the inherent risk a technology sales always has for the buyer by showing how a solution in a similiar situation has been succesfully implemented. Now good customer reference stories have to follow a certain scheme and provide the following content: (note: I'm just using examples to show what is meant by each step)
Situation: "Let me tell you an example of a situation that another Engineering Manager of a major software provider had."
Critical issue: "His critical issue was that he was unable to achieve the test load required without having to use two dozen interconnected stress testing devices."
Reasons: "Main reason for this problem was that his test devices were all non-shared, lacked the performance and had no means of connection to many software servers."
Capabilities: (when, who, and what) "He said he needed a way to have many different test engineers share the test facility at the same time while working from their desktop PCs and being able to run their own test scenarios whenever and for as long as they wanted."
We provided: "...him those capabilities."
Result: "The result was that over the last year they were able to reduce the overall testing time during development by 5 months which allows them to bring new products faster to the market since they are able to test faster, and still ensure the same if not even higher product quality."
Note: The above is -partly- derived from the New Solution Selling book.
