Just about every business web site has a section devoted to customer testimonials - little blurbs written by the customer that says how great you are. Lots of obvious reasons for this - shows that you have have real customers in real markets, good customers are your best salespeople, etc.
The Billtrust web site is no exception. We cycle through a number of testimonials on the secondary pages. Keep hitting refresh, you'll get another one. I'm not even sure how many different customers we list but it's a lot, far more than most sites. Our marketing team does a great job of keeping this fresh.
What we do that's fundamentally different than most sites is that we list actual customers - full name, title, and company name. Most sites list "CFO from a Fortune 500 Manufacturer" or something equally vague. From a competitive perspective, listing specific people is a very bad idea. Competitors will go to your web site, hit refresh a lot of times, and will call on your customers trying to convince them that their service is better, faster, cheaper, etc.
We look at this a bit differently. We think our service is so far superior than our competition, that we're willing to take this competitive risk. In exchange, we get the benefit that potential customers get to see real names from real companies that they know. In addition, people realize that if you're the kind of company that lists actual people as references, than you're the kind of company that has a special offering that's worth talking to.
Which kind of company do you work at?
Comments