Why Digital Word-Of-Mouth Matters, And How You Can Influence It

Word-of-mouth and referrals are known as the “famous duo”. It’s how every self-employed consultant finds his/her first clients when starting out. But their importance has been decreasing over time, mainly due to how word-of-mouth (WOM) has changed in the past years.

You should not neglect the famous duo: Repeated work and direct referrals are still the most cost-effective way to win businesses. Everything is easier when clients come to you — the level of trust is higher, the timing is good, and the sales cycle is usually much faster.

But the trend we’re covering here refers to the growing importance of marketing-driven digital word-of-mouth in B2B, and how it impacts your prospecting strategy.

Since many professionals struggle to distinguish WOM from referrals, let’s first explore the trap that young consultancies often fall into.

Avoiding The Referral Trap

Referrals are new businesses that come to you thanks to your existing clients and collaborators, and is often the result of great work.

Since no one recommends a service that does not deliver what it promises, getting repeated work and referrals is a living proof of the value you deliver. But they can become a trap for niche consultancies, inhibiting their growth.

The referral trap is a psychological one. Getting referrals is obviously something to be proud of. This sometimes leads less experienced founders to give a negative association to prospecting: “If you can’t find work within your existing network or retain clients, you’re either in the wrong niche or have a poor offering”.

It is easy to see that there’s no logic in this statement, but many consultants only start to prospect when work and opportunities dry up. And this can lead to a vicious cycle that reduces their sales effectiveness.

This is what Jeb Blount calls the Universal Law of Need in his book “Fanatical Prospecting”: The more you need something, the less likely you are to get it.

If you’re after new clients but barely have any promising opportunity on your pipeline, winning that one project becomes a matter of life or death. This will affect you psychologically, impacting how you present yourself and your work to prospects.

Seasoned consultants understand that the major drawback of relying on referrals and word-of-mouth is their unpredictability. Even if you ask for introductions in your network on a religious schedule, you never know when they will come. And at some point, you will have already reached out to all of your connections.

Taking a more incisive position with existing clients and collaborators can damage relationships — you are the one responsible to generate new opportunities, not your clients. You should nurture before asking.

Searching for new business outside your current network is your insurance against an empty pipeline. Not only that, but it also allows you to be more selective with clients and choose with whom you want to work.

Now let’s take a look at the second component of the “famous duo”: Word-of-mouth.

Digital Word-Of-Mouth And Distributed Trust

Word-of-mouth is not new. People have always talked about their experiences, needs, services, and brands. In the past, WOM was very personal and spontaneous, usually limited to an individual’s friends, family, and a small circle of acquaintances or colleagues.

What is relatively new, however, is marketing-driven digital or electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM).

Now that communication is increasingly online, the scale and speed that messages travel put businesses in a constant state of alert. Traditional consultancies either try to “protect their brand reputation” or invest in unorthodox and creative initiatives to benefit from viral effects.

When we personally promote or spread an idea, we’re putting our name behind it. It shows we trust it to be true. If we want to explore what’s behind eWOM, it’s worth looking at how the online world changed trust.

Rachel Botsman, in her book “Who Can You Trust?”, does a marvelous job showing how trust is being turned on its head:

“Trust and influence now lie more with “the people” — families, friends, fellow users, colleagues, even strangers — than with top-down elites, experts and authorities. It’s an age where individuals can have more sway than traditional institutions and customers are not just meek consumers but social influencers that define brands. (…) Institutional trust, taken on faith, kept in the hand of a privileged minority and operating behind closed doors, simply wasn’t designed for the digital age.”

It’s important to note that institutional trust still plays a huge role in the B2B market. But it is far from having the importance it had before.

Digital word-of-mouth is a powerful force in B2B mostly because prospects find it an unbiased and trustworthy source of information. With more and more professionals involved in the sales process, personal recommendations from “internal champions” become less effective. Online reviews and your digital reputation, on the other hand, seem to be more and more influential.

A McKinsey research reinforces this point by placing WOM as key initiative both in the B2C and B2B sector, and it is the primary factor behind 20 to 50% of all purchasing decisions.

Its importance grows even more once we dive into recent research stating that, at least until now, eWOM is not always that trustworthy. Due to different sources of online bias, we are now seeing the growth of inherently negative reviews and incorrect descriptions of a service. Taking that into consideration, it is easy to understand why most consultancies have been taking a more passive and “defensive” stance online.

Having zero digital footprint, however, is the worse choice for businesses. First, you lose relevancy in your niche and are seen as less credible by prospects. Second, it doesn’t prevent any harm — even if you refuse to be there, clients and collaborators can and will use digital channels to talk about you.

In his book “The secrets of word of mouth marketing”, George Silverman suggests a simple exercise: look at every interaction from a WOM perspective. By doing so, he argues that the biggest benefit of having people share positive experiences about your business is accelerating the sales cycle. By increasing the level of trust that clients have in you and your business, decisions are made faster. But how can you do that?

The 3 Key eWOM Stages

Consultants can influence eWOM, but to do that you must first understand how it works. To keep this piece concise, we are not exploring the different theories, frameworks, or social models that look at word-of-mouth and virality. It’s enough to define the different eWOM stages.

Digital word-of-mouth can be divided into three key stages: creation, exposure, and evaluation.

1. Creation: For a message to be created, people and businesses need to have something to say about you and your brand.
2. Exposure: A message that is not seen by anyone has no impact. It must be either publicly or privately shared.
3. Evaluation: When people see the message, they consciously or unconsciously make a judgment about it.

Even though you don’t have control over what, how, and when people talk about your brand, having a plan of action for each of these stages is the first step to stack the odds in your favor.

How can you encourage clients to share positive experiences? How can you ensure these messages reach your target audience? How can you make prospects take these messages into account during the sales process?

Prospecting insights and ideas to explore:

Consultancies won’t be able to ignore eWOM for long. With more and more communication taking place on digital channels, you can’t “opt-out” of it. Business can and should actively shape the conversation others are having about it.

Here are three ideas we expect to see more often in the future, each one related to a different eWOM stage.

1. Creating a Talk Trigger:

Most consultants take a passive approach to word-of-mouth. They just assume that some people will talk about their business. But will they? And if so, what are they saying?

To have something that gets carried over these channels the first thing you need is obviously content — only a good story is worth sharing. But that’s only going to happen if you’re offering something memorable enough to bring up in conversation in the first place. You need a talk trigger.

A talk trigger is not something you say differently, but something that your business does differently. It’s not a price, a promotion, or a contest. A talk trigger is an operational choice that turns clients into marketers of your brand.

In the book that first explored this idea, Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin listed some real-life examples of talk triggers:

1. Hilton’s DoubleTree has been serving warm chocolate chip cookies to guests for more than thirty years. Today, it amounts to 75,000 cookies every day across its 500 global locations. The cookies are baked every day, in each hotel. More than one-third of their customers say they’ve mentioned the cookie to someone else.
2. The Cheesecake Factory made its enormous menus their talk trigger. These are 5,940 words long and feature 85 chicken dishes alone. This could overwhelm or even annoy customers, but it actually generates a huge number of conversations and recommendations — 57% mention the size of the menu when recommending the restaurant.
3. A talking trigger doesn’t have to be big. Dr. Glenn Gorab, an American oral surgeon, goes out of his way to empathize with first-time patients by calling them a week before their appointment to introduce himself and answer any questions they might have. Simple, but effective.

Many B2B consultants focus exclusively on following best practices when interacting with clients and prospects. And this makes sense, as it reduces risk.

But the problem with that approach is that it doesn’t create any chatter. If you want people to tell stories about you, you must do something they do not expect. Exceptional Consultants choose to do just one thing differently in their operations, and by doing that they create more eWOM.

Talk triggers are remarkable, relevant, reasonable, and repeatable. It could be having a more personal engagement with your clients. Offering insights and value beyond the scope of the project. One of our clients for instance have recently created their own book club, and invited clients and collaborators to join it.

There are several good examples in the consultancy industry, but you must come up with your own. Jay Bear’s book is a great guide to do so.

2. Running social media listening and B2B influencer campaigns:

We know that people discuss brands and services with one another. What we also know, however, is that there are people who “participate in WOM” far more than others. The key to understanding what causes this is to explore the reasons why people share news and opinions.

While individual motivations can be difficult to precise, it’s easier to see and measure how people engage online. One of the components of a word-of-mouth marketing action is often identifying people with an influential voice on a specific topic or niche, such as bloggers and thought leaders.

Since they usually interact with others in public, we can also have a clue of who has a positive view of you and your brand and could help share positive messages with their own audience. This process is also known as “social media listening.”

But what do you do with it? If you’re objective is to improve exposure, you need to amplify your reach. Influencers, whose opinion your audience seems to trust, can promote the message. This will require a lot of one-on-one conversations (and sometimes relationship-building), but it will benefit not only your business but also your personal brand.

If you’re interested in experimenting with it, we highly recommend you outsource the initial research and outreach execution, which is quite time-consuming.

3. Incorporating eWOM in sales collateral:

While you can’t predict any sales outcome, you do have control of the sales process. If you have testimonials, recommendations, and case studies, why can’t you leverage them as you engage with prospects?

Many consultants neglect their importance. We see case studies hidden on their websites. Messages from previous clients scattered across email and different social media platforms.

You can’t expect your prospects to do extensive research on you — it is your responsibility to put client-generated content together and include it in your sales content. This is an easy task for niche consultancies due to their small number of clients, but its benefits are astonishing.

The best way to promote your services is to craft a message that speaks to your prospects’ unique needs and challenges. When you use quotes from previous clients, you are using the same language they do. You show that you understand where they are now, and can help them make the change they need, the way they need it.

The easiest way to leverage positive word-of-mouth during the sales process is to simply put it in front of your prospects every time you can. Include them in documents, presentations, emails. As the saying goes, ‘Show, don’t tell.’