Customer Reviews For B2B

Updated January 7, 2023

Five Stars

Customer reviews are an are part of building your business online reputation. When you first find a company online you often won’t know anything about them, and reviews from Google, Facebook, or third-party websites can be a good way to get an idea of what to expect. However, customer reviews have long been thought of as a B2C ‘thing’. While there’s no harm in a B2B agency having customer reviews (in fact for an agency such as ourselves, it’s quite important), many business to business companies have neglected collecting customer reviews. Here’s why this is no longer true.

Case Studies 101

With the rise of the internet, a businesses catchment area has grown exponentially. So the chances of working with a company that you have never heard of are much higher than it would have been 20 years ago. Because of that companies developed case studies as a way to explain to their B2B customers how they worked, and what successes they’ve had.

The idea of a case study is simple; walk through a situation where you have created a positive outcome for a client, then advertise it with the client’s public seal of approval. Social proof in a PDF.

Inherent Bias

However case studies are obviously written with one purpose in mind; driving sales. They’re usually written by sales or marketing departments (not customer success) and are they are focused on what has gone well with the client in question. While a case study with some cursory negative points might be enough to convince a B2C customer that you’ve shown your business ‘wars and all’ it doesn’t work as well in B2B sales. Case studies come under even greater scrutiny when they are done with anonymous clients. These types of case study could be totally made up or an amalgamation of different client projects. There is no way to verify them.

Reviews

This is where reviews step in. A review hosted on Google, Facebook, Yelp, Amazon or any other third party site has its flaws. But they are generally considered to be more reliable than a case study. A company with 100 four star reviews on Yelp is probably not all bad. Sure, you should check the one-star reviews and pay attention to what they say, but largely speaking, it’s a number’s game.

To get reviews you should develop a process where you make your customers aware that they can review your business. Many review websites don’t like you emailing them to request they review you as they feel this is pressuring a positive response, but regardless you should develop a process of aftercare for your clients that includes making them aware they can be reviewing you if they want to. Then once they have, be sure you are active on the review platform responding to both the positive and negative reviews. are will show other potential customers that you care about your clients after they’ve finished paying you.

Photo credit – Top: Pxhere
                           Bottom: Pixabay