Use PR to Sell More, Faster
Growth-stage B2B startups need revenue fast. Which means they need a strong sales pipeline.
But B2B customers won’t buy a product on a sales rep’s word alone. If they’re going to trust a new company, they need strong evidence of success. In other words, they need stories straight from your customers.
Blitzz founder Rama Sreenivasan realized this early on.
Blitzz’s remote video software transforms the way companies handle customer support and inspections. But to connect with prospective customers, the sales team needed stories that proved Blitzz worked. This way, a prospect could see themselves using Blitzz without feeling they’d been sold to and wonder where this software had been all along.
To capture this firsthand proof, Blitzz turned to PR for a storytelling assist. Here’s how Blitzz and Propllr partnered to secure customer narratives, share them with reporters, and use them to boost sales.
“The experience with Propllr has been strategic, genuine, and smooth. Our customers, too, have loved working with them to get our shared stories out. We frequently hear from inbound prospects who see these stories in the press.”
— Rama Sreenivasan, Blitzz CEO & Co-Founder
Challenge: Get Customers to Sing Your Praises
We had a hunch that Blitzz’s customers would rave about their experience in a heartbeat. But getting them to do so in a media outlet was a challenge.
Some customers had strict internal policies that barred joint PR opportunities. Others had no such policies – but needed to to first see concrete evidence of Blitzz’s value.
To earn these customers’ support, then, we needed to make a strong case for joint PR. What’s more, we needed a clear strategy to maximize its value for Blitzz and its customers.
Strategy: Make Joint PR Worth Your Customers’ Time (And Yours)
For Blitzz, joint PR would have to position the customer as the hero of their story – with Blitzz the fulcrum of their success.
The customer would gain valuable media coverage with minimal effort, and Blitzz would grow its credibility across industries where it could use each story to fuel sales outreach.
Here’s how we landed customers to participate in Blitzz’s PR program.
1. Embrace the Ask
For a lot of companies, asking customers for joint PR is the hardest part. Many don’t want to burden their customers with a new commitment, risk rocking the boat, or introduce a contract negotiation lever.
But we embraced the ask. We carefully emphasized the value of joint PR as a rare opportunity for Blitzz’s customers to boost their own visibility with little more effort than a brief info-gathering call.
With a few quick emails and Linkedin messages (referencing our connection to Blitzz), we opened the door to a wealth of customer stories. One of the most powerful examples? We reached out to one customer’s chief storytelling officer with a four-sentence ask – and secured a phone call that led to placements in three of the top home and commercial security trade publications.
2. Make News Out of Everyday Contracts
Once we connected with Blitzz’s customers, we focused on finding ways to turn an everyday occurrence – signing a contract with a customer – into a newsworthy event. The key for impact here: concrete details about each partnership.
We asked leaders for everything from user anecdotes to usage metrics and KPIs. The more specifics we had, the more impactful the narrative would be, and the better it would ultimately resonate with Blitzz’s prospects.
We used the information we gathered to craft powerful press releases. Blitzz’s customers reviewed each one so they had a hand in the final product – a way to give them more agency in telling their story. And when industry trades picked up the release, both Blitzz and the customer benefited.
3. Share Customer News with Reporters
A pitch about a new customer support or inspection product might not stand out to every reporter. But a story about an industry leader using that product? That’s a lot more interesting. You can think of this as “show, don’t tell” in practice: using strong narratives to give reporters a reason to cover each partnership.
Thanks to our PR strategy, we had plenty of those narratives on hand. As a result, we were able to secure fantastic coverage for Blitzz and its customers across multiple target verticals.
4. Tell Customer Stories over LinkedIn and on Event Stages
As we racked up PR placements, we shared each one with Blitzz’s sales team. Reps used them to bolster their LinkedIn outreach. Rather than saying, “Want to learn more about how our tech works?” Blitzz’s sales team could say, “Here’s how our customer in your industry uses Blitzz every day.”
The added layer of credibility – since it ran in an industry media outlet – made Blitzz that much more compelling to prospects. What’s more, Blitzz was able to repurpose stories on its site’s newsroom and blog so prospects could discover them while researching the company.
Blitzz’s sales team also shared customer stories on multiple industry conference stages. These resonated with attendees, especially compared with traditional vendor talks. According to Blitzz’s head of sales, “Concrete stories provide proof and maximum credibility for our prospects. They can even help us get deals signed faster.”
Results: More Credibility and More Qualified Prospects
Since the start of our program, Blitzz’s customer stories have led to placements in a wide range of media outlets, from top industry trade publications (like DestinationCRM, Automotive News and Security Sales & Integration) to mainstream publications (like Axios and Consumer Reports).
In several cases, our work with Blitzz customers on joint PR has drawn in qualified leads. For instance, two companies reached out about a trial after seeing a Supply House Times article that mentioned Blitzz. And another company connected with Blitzz’s sales team after seeing a presentation at a conference, and now it’s testing out a proof of concept.
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