Making Customers Your Biggest Source of Pipeline

🫶 Build Buyer Trust Through Community

Corrina Owens, ABM & GTM Strategist

🌎 The CONTEXT:

During her time at Gong, Corrina Owens built ABM programs to break into enterprise accounts.

Most notably, she built a program that "matched prospects with experienced customers as a way to replace the typical customer reference process."

At the time, with their late-stage deals, they were having a difficult time getting buy-in across the org's sales team. The most common blocker was a fear of their sales calls being recorded. "Big Brother" was all buyers could see with the Gong brand.

Traditionally, a vendor's salesperson connects their prospect with a pre-selected customer reference. But “there is a lot of distrust put into that,” Corrina mentioned. Vendor involvement came across as a conflict of interest.

Corrina had to get creative if they were going to keep earning trust from buyers.

🧐 The HOW:

With the help of Matcha.so 🍵 (formerly Meetsy), they built a matching program that connected their customers (former skeptics themselves) with late-stage prospects for a 1:1 virtual chat.

With this program, “We were completely removed from the process. All we would do was send them to the community.”

📈 The RESULT:

Over 600 introductions were made the first year, and over 1,500 have been made since January 2024!

💰 Using Customers in the Sales Process

Thomas Smeallie, VP of Sales at Planhat

Your existing customers are some of your greatest assets.

Few salespeople know the power of the customer quite like Thomas Smeallie, VP of Sales at Planhat.

When we asked Thomas how his team uses current customers to build revenue, he mentioned how "customer references are requested in almost all of our sales processes."

Doing this well requires intentionality. Keeping your eyes peeled for the right connections can make all the difference. 👀

"The customer success community is a tight knit one, and generally when we're in a sales process, we see folks connected to current customers. We always encourage prospects to speak with them if they are close; getting a review from a trusted source in your own network is invaluable," Thomas said.

Being intentional with your customers also means staying proactive when it comes to opportunity creation:

"From time to time, we will politely ask current customers to make introductions to folks in their network who we hope to speak with. A warm introduction from a happy customer is the best possible way to start a sales process!"