How Customer Advocacy Builds Trust and Accelerates Sales Velocity

In an ideal world, you could move from prospect to a closed deal quickly and without objections. But in reality, it often takes time and effort to get potential customers all the way across the finish line.

Shortening the sales cycle gives your business the opportunity to achieve more revenue in less time. But to accelerate your sales velocity, potential customers need to feel like they have a high degree of trust, knowledge, and even enthusiasm for your brand and product. 

Customer advocacy can help you check all of those boxes. Here’s how leveraging customer stories and testimonial videos can help you improve your sales velocity—and get closer to that ideal sales speed. 

1. Customer advocacy cultivates more trust

When it comes to trust in brands, there’s an alarming gap. According to recent PwC research, while 87% of executives believe that consumers trust their company, only 30% of consumers agree that they highly trust brands.

Today’s discerning consumers might be wary of trusting brands, but they do have a lot of confidence and faith in customer advocates. In fact, 46% of customers say they trust consumer reviews just as much as personal recommendations from their own friends and family. 

Sharing a testimonial video as part of the sales process allows you to dial down on the hard sell. High pressure tactics that only increase consumer skepticism and distrust. Instead, let your satisfied customers do the talking for you.

When you don’t have to work so hard to gain or build trust, potential customers are not only more likely to buy—they’re more likely to buy faster. 

2. Customer advocacy generates more qualified leads

You don’t just want leads—you want qualified leads. Your sales team wants to connect with people who have already demonstrated a strong intent to make a purchase. 

Customer advocacy is one of the best ways to generate far more qualified leads. Numerous studies and statistics show that leads that come from customer referrals have higher conversion rates, retention rates, and overall lifetime value.

Leads that come to your business through referrals, testimonial videos, and other customer advocacy efforts already have a level of trust and a basic familiarity with your offering. Your sales team can spend less time covering the basics and more time cultivating and strengthening the relationship. And a stronger relationship usually makes for a faster closing cycle.

3. Customer advocacy gives you a better understanding of your product and customer

Your entire sales process is far more efficient and effective when it incorporates the voice of the customer—a deep understanding of their preferences and expectations. That’s another benefit of customer advocacy: it arms you with detailed and real-world customer insights.

Customer stories and testimonial videos will enlighten you on a variety of topics including:

• Why did customers choose your business over competitors?
• How are customers using your product or service?
• What results have customers experienced? 

That’s valuable information and feedback you can use to shape your overall messaging and sales process moving forward. These types of compelling sales points can also help educate your prospects and move them through your pipeline even faster. 

4. Customer advocacy addresses objections

Objections are a common part of the sales process, but can be hard for your sales team to effectively address. This is another area where customer advocacy can offer huge benefits.

As you build your collection of customer stories and testimonials, your sales team will be armed with an entire resource library of content that they can share with potential customers who are hesitant or considering going with a competitor. 

Your sales team can select and share targeted customer testimonials that directly address those specific competitors or objections. This helps to mitigate potential customer concerns, foster more trust, elevate your product and business, and ultimately move you closer to a deal.

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5. Customer advocacy grounds your product in reality

Your customers are a fount of knowledge. They might use your product in ways you wouldn’t have thought of. They might have data points that show meaningful results your product helped them achieve. They might have fascinating anecdotes or examples that are sure to grip other prospective customers.

Customer advocacy makes your product (and its impact) feel far more real and tangible. Especially when you use video testimonials instead of written ones. 90% of the information transmitted to our brains is visual, and we’re able to process visual information far more efficiently than written information. 

Written reviews and testimonials can also feel somewhat anonymous and impersonal. After all, there’s a big difference between reading an anonymous quote, and watching a short video of a real customer talking about a product, how they use it, and why they love it.

Video is undeniably powerful. When compared with text, using video for customer advocacy is more trustworthy, more memorable, and more meaningful. You can check out our guide to asking for a video testimonial here. 

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Streamline your sales process with customer advocacy

A quicker deal cycle means generating more revenue faster—and giving your sales team more time to focus on converting other leads. 

Customer advocacy is one of the best ways to skyrocket your sales velocity. Using customer stories and testimonial videos generates more qualified leads, equips you with reliable information about your customers, builds more trust, and addresses objections. 

Plus, customer advocacy videos not only help your sales team, they also give your marketing and customer support teams valuable content they can use to promote your product and retain your existing customers.

Collecting video from your customers doesn’t need to be challenging or time-consuming.
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Like to try Vouch?

Loved by companies like Canva, Nike, Cisco, Stryker, HubSpot, Amazon and more, tools like Vouch make leveraging video in your business remarkably easy.

Be sure to book a Vouch demo today and chat with a video content expert.

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