How do you infuse storytelling to build trust when you can't use named logos in customer stories?

Here are a few other way you can build trust with audience:

• Use anonymized case studies: Instead of named logos, describe the customer in terms of their industry, size, or geographic location. For example, “a leading global retailer” or “a fast-growing tech startup” can add credibility while keeping the customer anonymous.

• Highlight measurable outcomes: Quantitative results, such as increased productivity, reduced costs, or faster time to resolution, build trust by showing real impact. Numbers tell a powerful story, even without a specific customer name attached.

• Use testimonials or quotes: Anonymized quotes from customers are another great way to build trust. Even without a name, hearing directly from a customer’s perspective can be powerful and credible.

• Third-party validation: Use industry awards, certifications, or independent analyst reports as additional proof points. This external validation can boost credibility when you can’t rely on logos.

Not being able to use named logos is SUCH a common struggle with PMM & customer advocacy teams. There are some ways to still tell compelling stories & claims without named logos: lean into anonymity, leverage public sources of stories, and run customer research to collect claims.

Lean into the anonymity to build trust.

• Sometimes it's a benefit not to share the logo because what they're doing with your product gives them SUCH an edge, they don't want to share. We see this when trying to tell our market research customer stories at Survey Monkey - doing research is part of their competitive advantage!

• In some industries, like financial services, the clients wouldn't want you sharing their story either, so they are used to & just as accepting of masked stories.

Leverage review sites or other public sources.

• At SurveyMonkey, we publish badges, review scores, and review quotes on our site even though they aren't named.

• We also mine PR mentions to find stories from customers or publications that mention us themselves. We have slack channel called #surveymonkey-in-the-wild where PR shares examples of customers either publicly sharing their surveys or even publishing the results of their studies.

Run customer research to collect claims.

• Sometime stats can resonate just as much as individual stories.

• We run research with our customer to refresh claims that validate our value props. E.g.: XX% of customers say they are up and running the same day.

This is a classic PMM challenge. You have to get a bit creative in your you source social proof. Here are a few options:

1. See if you can get the customer to agree to an anonymized case study, but still specify company size, vertical, geo, and role. You can still tell an illustrative (and specific) story this way, but it may lack some of the gravitas of a big logo.

2. Source opinionated metrics via a survey. You can use tools like TechValidate for this, or develop and run your own survey across your customers. You can get stats like "XX% of customers agree or strongly agree that their process is more efficient after using X product." This can also offset a case study where a customer won't agree to sharing quantifiable stats as part of their story.

3. Borrow stats from reputable sources - Gartner, Forrester, HBR, McKinsey, and others (depending on your industry) to frame up your problem statements.

4. Tell your dogfooding story. Customers and prospects want to know you've figured out how to use your products to their fullest potential. Focus on developing your internal use cases into externally shareable stories that have all of the detail you wish your customer stories did.

5. See if customers would be open to different formats for customer stories. Customers may not be open to a written case study that goes on the website, but they may be open to speaking on a webinar or at an event, being interviewed in a Q&A format for a blog post, or to being used as a reference in non-competitive customer conversations.

And of course, if this becomes a chronic issue for your storytelling - don't hesitate to write up the business case for more investment in customer marketing and/or seller incentives to get customer stories written into sales contracts!

Customer stories are an effective mode of storytelling, and help prospects imagine the type of success they might experience with your product or platform. If you can't use customer names or logos, here are a few tips to build trust and resonance with your audience:

• Contextualize the story: Provide sufficient detail to help your prospect relate to the story. Offer the industry, company size, and relevant details about the customer. You may also want to share who you worked with. For example, "We partnered with the CMO of a growing retail company with >500 employees, currently expanding from US operations to global."

• Share data! Data bolsters any story. You can say, "customers like you have seen X results working with us. Let me tell you how they did it."

• Use third-party validation: Whether its an analyst or review site (like G2 or Capterra), use a third-party to bring credibility to anonymous customer stories or quotes.

Anyone who markets to major global companies encounters this challenge. I'm so glad you asked the question. Here are a few things I've found that have worked.

• Ask for their perspective, not their logo: I've found that some companies that are unable to give you rights to show their logo or speak about their use of your product in a case study, can get permissions to be interviewed on a topic for a piece of thought leadership. As long as the line does not get crossed into where they are recommending a service or product, you (and they) have some leeway. The good news is, this is often the more interesting content anyway for your audience. So don't ask them if they'd be in a case study. Ask them to share how they approach their work or their perspectives on where the industry is headed. You can also ease the risk by making sure they can review and approve any article you cowrite or interview you run.

• Integrate advocacy into their renewal deals. After a really strong brand has had meaningful success on your product, but still has internal challenges against allowing logo rights, offer to lower their contract rates in exchange for logo rights or a case study. Having a financial incentive won't work for all companies but can be a wedge to reopen the conversation.

• Remember there are different ways to advocate for your brand: Perhaps a customer can't share their logo on your website, but they may be open to being a reference call for deals in progress for you in the future. Reference calls are even more powerful than a logo display. Alternately, they may be open to joining you as a copresenter at an event or being interviewed for a piece of thought leadership as mentioned above.

• Finally, if you really can't do any of these, ask if you can use a quote in an unattributed way. "A COO at a global, publicly traded retail company said this about our product."
  

If there were a question that I too would love the answer to... I go back and forth on whether or not it makes sense to do generic “case studies” on the website. I am mostly of the opinion that it doesn’t. What I’ve seen other companies do is quote individuals with their permission and link to their LinkedIn…so it doesn’t say that Apple loves our product. It says that Tim Cook does…and here’s a link to Tim’s bio. I think if you can’t use a customer logo in a case study, however, there’s likely more work that needs to be done to make sure that customer is willing to go on record talking about their experience using your product. So I would say, focus on that, get them on the record, and you’ll have found it was worth it because the logo (especially large, respected ones) carry tons of weight in the right communities.

Customer evidence is so valuable to provide proof that your product/service/solution drives the outcomes you claim! A few techniques I've used when I can't use a customer name/logo:

• Aggregate results. For example, do you have a dozen customers in a given sector that are all measuring the same outcome (e.g., faster sales cycle times). Then use that to say "on average, customers in X segment achieve Y improvement in sales cycle times".

• Genericize the company. You can still use quotes, testimonials or even build out case studies without citing the specific company. Instead, you can genericize to represent their industry, size or region--so long as it does, in fact, veil who the customer is. E.g., "A mid-size life sciences company in Germany."

You can do this manually. I've also recently been checking out a product, UserEvidence, that is a great tool that can help support this exact kind of scenario in a scalable way.