Most B2B marketers obsess over the usual suspects: conversion rates, MQLs, pipeline velocity. But there’s a more powerful force that often gets overlooked: customers who brag about your brand.
When customers become walking billboards for your brand, you’ve struck marketing gold. But how do you make that happen? Andrew Lee has the answers.
Andrew leads channel partner marketing at Microsoft (specifically for the Surface line), and his entire job is figuring out what makes customers want to share. Drawing on his experience in retail (8 years at Amazon launching products like Echo and Fire TV) and B2B (via a stint at J.P. Morgan), he’s seen customer behavior from every angle. And as he pointed out on our Best Story Wins podcast, the best way to garner word-of-mouth is to create marketing stories that customers are proud to share.
The Secret: Mapping Product to Identity
According to Andrew, the first thing you need to understand is that people don’t just buy products. They buy signals they can send to themselves and others about who they are (or who they want to be).
Sometimes, that means you need to label them before they label themselves. For example, an athletic brand might speak to their amateur audience as though they are pro athletes. Planting that seed makes them see themselves differently, and it takes off from there.
However, this isn’t manipulation. It’s understanding human psychology. When someone buys a MacBook Pro, they’re not just buying processing power; they’re buying into an identity as a creator. When a company chooses Salesforce, they’re not just buying CRM software; they’re signaling they’re serious about growth and belong among other serious companies.
If you think about your own product, what identity does it signal? What does it say about the buyer when they choose you over a competitor? That’s not a superficial question; it’s the foundation of whether people will talk about you.
Once you have clarity on who you’re “for” in that sense, you can build your marketing strategy around the aspirational identity your customers want to embody. Here are Andrew’s top tips to do that.
1. Make customers feel like they own part of your story.
The brands people brag about are the ones they feel personally invested in. When customers feel like they’re part of your story (and not just consuming it), they become natural advocates.
Think about the difference between a $3 can of commodity tomato sauce and a $12 artisanal brand that tells you about its hand-picked basil from Italy. The higher price point actually works in the brand’s favor because it signals care, craft, and a story worth retelling. When someone serves that sauce at dinner, they don’t just say “it’s tomato sauce.” They share the story about the Italian basil.
Your B2B product might not have Italian basil, but it has something special. Maybe it’s the hundreds of customer interviews that shaped your roadmap. Maybe it’s the engineering challenge your team overcame. Maybe it’s the “why we built this” story that your founder can tell in a way that gives people chills.
Telling those stories seeps into people’s psyches almost through osmosis. As Andrew puts it, if you’ve put that much labor into your product/service and you’re telling the story of that labor, the customer feels like the beneficiary of that labor, and they’re more into sharing that story. It almost feels like they have skin in the game, too.
Tip: Think about what makes your brand special. What is a narrative that is authentic, specific, and memorable enough that customers can retell it? You can literally test this by asking customers to explain your product to someone else. If they can’t articulate the story, it’s not clear enough.
2. Give them something worth bragging about.
Beyond a customer’s role in your story, they want to tell their own story. Or, rather, they want to look good in their own story. “At the end of the day, a lot of the reason why we buy stuff is because we want to tell our friends we bought it,” Andrew says. In other words, we want to show off.
This applies in B2B just as much as B2C. When a procurement officer chooses your solution, they want to be able to tell other procurement officers why it was a smart choice. When a VP of Marketing selects your platform, they want ammunition to brag about it to their peers at the next conference.
Salesforce, for example, understood this from day one. People want to tell others they bought Salesforce because it sounds cool, it’s what successful companies use, and it signals they’re making strategic decisions. The product has to deliver (and it does), but the bragging rights are built right into the positioning.
Tip: What about your product is genuinely bragworthy? Is it your customer support response time? Your unique approach to a common problem? Your impressive client roster? Your innovative pricing model? Identify the “wow” moments in your product that naturally become conversation starters.
These aren’t always the biggest features. Sometimes it’s a thoughtful detail that shows you really understand your customers’ world. Make those moments obvious and easy to talk about.
3. Create marketing that customers will repeat verbatim.
When your customers can articulate your value proposition as well as you can—maybe even better—you’ve created something powerful.
Andrew likens it to your experience at a farmer’s market. It’s not just that the produce is (theoretically) better. It’s that the farmer tells you a story about how they handpicked it, or used a particular planting method, or used the highest quality stock. Because of that story, you genuinely feel like it’s going to be a better product, and you get excited to repeat it to your dinner guests.
The B2B version? It might sound like: “We chose this vendor because they’re the only ones who really understand the challenge of managing enterprise security at scale” or “What sold us was their approach to implementation. They actually assign a dedicated team for the first 90 days.”
Those aren’t marketing sound bites. Those are stories customers tell each other. And they’re infinitely more valuable than any ad campaign.
Tip: When you’re crafting messaging, think about the storytelling vs. messaging. Would a customer naturally say it to a colleague? If it sounds like marketing-speak, it won’t get repeated. If it sounds like how real people talk about real solutions to real problems, you’re on the right track.
Don’t Forget: Your Best Marketing Happens After the Sale
Most B2B marketers treat the sale as a finish line. It’s not. It’s the starting gun.
The most powerful marketing happens after the purchase—in conversations between buyers, in Slack channels where someone asks “Anyone have experience with X?”, and in vendor evaluation meetings when an existing customer champions your solution. In fact, according to research from Daniel Priestley’s book Oversubscribed, sophisticated B2B buyers need around 7 hours of brand exposure before making a decision. A huge portion of those hours come from peer conversations, not your ads.
So focus not just on closing deals but creating advocates who are genuinely excited about sharing why they chose you. Give them stories they’re proud to tell. Give them details that make them look smart for choosing you. Give them ammunition to brag. Because we all want to believe we make good decisions—and the brands that win are the ones that make it easy for customers to prove they did.
Want to hear more about how behavioral psychology shapes B2B marketing? Listen to our full conversation with Andrew Lee on the Best Story Wins podcast. And if you’re looking for help creating marketing that turns customers into advocates, let’s chat about how we can help you tell bragworthy stories.
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