How to Ensure Customer Stories Are Actively Used Internally and Externally by Sales Teams

·Apr 21, 2026 08:32 PM·

Hi everyone 👋🏽Quick question - how are you ensuring customer stories actually get used both internally (especially by Sales) and externally? We’re publishing one every other week and have a solid activation checklist, but they still seem to get missed. Any best practices or creative ways you’ve driven real adoption (not just awareness)?

13 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Gabrielle Herrera
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Do you have a sales enablement team? I would connect with them to understand distribution channels you may be missing like seismic or internal newsletters.
Gabrielle Herrera
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They can also help you workshop the right value prop for these assets
Varsha Ahir
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Hi Gabrielle, yes. I get the stories added to our enablement platform and share through slack and do a round up of top stories in monthly sales forum as well. Are there any other distribution channels you have come across?
Gabrielle Herrera
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Have you tried having it come from the sales enablement team instead of you?
🧐1
Maria Ogneva
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I built a quick AI module that sends stories and references into the opportunity record based on the particulars of the account and the deal. There are lots of great advocacy platforms that do this out of the box too. At my last company I had built a UserEvidence library of all assets - quotes, case studies, social posts, videos, etc - that was filterable by use case, company size, products used, etc. I worked with enablement to get this stood up. You can use AI to bring these artifacts into Salesforce - or as i mentioned, use an off the shelf platform to do it (Deeto, Champion, UserEvidence, SlapFive, etc)
💡4
Maria Ogneva
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here's a brief demo of what my quick 'n dirty AI agent looks like https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7447338303848321025
Maria Ogneva
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So TLDR; bring the assets where sales live. they are not going to go into a spreadsheet or a slack to get a case study. you want to make it easy to match content to parameters of the deal and opportunity account
Carla Cuadros
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Are you tracking activation and usage of the customer stories? If so, could you introduce a light gamification element—like a sales leaderboard highlighting the account managers who use them most?
🙌1
Chrissy Mariotti
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I have found that sometimes packaging things differently can help. As you know everyone has preferences on how they consume information and for some reading through a curated flipbook might work but for others watching a video might help. Just a thought to consider! Good luck!
❤️2
Kate Speights
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We share new stories within multiple sales and marketing Webex spaces, and also provide social links to these audiences to make it easy to share the story externally. In addition to what's shared above, perhaps send a regular email update to sales leaders with these new stories, and present them on sales calls. Given your amazing success in capturing stories every other week, you can remind the sales teams about these (they have short term memory, I swear) and where to find them, assuming you have a library or webpage or sales folder/tool where they are all stored. Remaining top of mind is key!
Kate Speights
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·
This is in addition to anything Sales Enablement is doing - since they're doing a lot, it helps to hear about stories from a different source.
Sandra Grauschopf
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(edited)·
Have you tried asking Sales if they'd like slides to include with their pitch decks? We take great quotes and put them into branded slides, along with links to the full customer story. You're probably already doing this, but it's also important to make sure that your stories go the extra mile to highlight objections that prospects are voicing in calls. When your formatting makes common objection responses easy to see at a glance, their usefulness is more obvious.
❤️2
Varsha Ahir
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·
Love this idea Sandra Grauschopf TY!
❤️1

Gabrielle Herrera
·
·
Do you have a sales enablement team? I would connect with them to understand distribution channels you may be missing like seismic or internal newsletters.
Gabrielle Herrera
·
·
They can also help you workshop the right value prop for these assets
Varsha Ahir
·
·
Hi Gabrielle, yes. I get the stories added to our enablement platform and share through slack and do a round up of top stories in monthly sales forum as well. Are there any other distribution channels you have come across?
Gabrielle Herrera
·
·
Have you tried having it come from the sales enablement team instead of you?
🧐1
Maria Ogneva
·
·
I built a quick AI module that sends stories and references into the opportunity record based on the particulars of the account and the deal. There are lots of great advocacy platforms that do this out of the box too. At my last company I had built a UserEvidence library of all assets - quotes, case studies, social posts, videos, etc - that was filterable by use case, company size, products used, etc. I worked with enablement to get this stood up. You can use AI to bring these artifacts into Salesforce - or as i mentioned, use an off the shelf platform to do it (Deeto, Champion, UserEvidence, SlapFive, etc)
💡4
Maria Ogneva
·
·
here's a brief demo of what my quick 'n dirty AI agent looks like https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7447338303848321025
Maria Ogneva
·
·
So TLDR; bring the assets where sales live. they are not going to go into a spreadsheet or a slack to get a case study. you want to make it easy to match content to parameters of the deal and opportunity account
Carla Cuadros
·
·
Are you tracking activation and usage of the customer stories? If so, could you introduce a light gamification element—like a sales leaderboard highlighting the account managers who use them most?
🙌1
Chrissy Mariotti
·
·
I have found that sometimes packaging things differently can help. As you know everyone has preferences on how they consume information and for some reading through a curated flipbook might work but for others watching a video might help. Just a thought to consider! Good luck!
❤️2
Kate Speights
·
·
We share new stories within multiple sales and marketing Webex spaces, and also provide social links to these audiences to make it easy to share the story externally. In addition to what's shared above, perhaps send a regular email update to sales leaders with these new stories, and present them on sales calls. Given your amazing success in capturing stories every other week, you can remind the sales teams about these (they have short term memory, I swear) and where to find them, assuming you have a library or webpage or sales folder/tool where they are all stored. Remaining top of mind is key!
Kate Speights
·
·
This is in addition to anything Sales Enablement is doing - since they're doing a lot, it helps to hear about stories from a different source.
Sandra Grauschopf
·
(edited)·
Have you tried asking Sales if they'd like slides to include with their pitch decks? We take great quotes and put them into branded slides, along with links to the full customer story. You're probably already doing this, but it's also important to make sure that your stories go the extra mile to highlight objections that prospects are voicing in calls. When your formatting makes common objection responses easy to see at a glance, their usefulness is more obvious.
❤️2
Varsha Ahir
·
·
Love this idea Sandra Grauschopf TY!
❤️1