The magic of customer snippets in sales training

Product marketers usually rely on sales teams to bring messaging, value props, and competitive differentiators to life.

But too often, their message doesn’t carry. Live training isn't absorbed, and follow-up materials aren’t adopted.

The problem is that many PMMs overlook what people actually need in a sales training. Sellers crave real-world examples they can share with prospects—not theoretical concepts and venn diagrams.

And, while there are many ways to make training more engaging, one of the simplest and most effective techniques is to bring the life and soul of the customer into the experience.

Customer snippets—in the form of video, audio, or even just text-based quotes—instantly grab people’s attention. Quotes or clips from actual customer conversations humanize and validate your content, making it more memorable, impactful, and referenceable in a salesperson’s day-to-day life.

In this article, I’ll cover why customer snippets work so well in presentations, how to capture them, and how to deploy them tactfully.

Why sales presentations don’t work without customer voices

The average human attention span is believed to be around eight seconds. This makes it extremely important to understand how people learn and what grabs their attention.

Most people would tell you they don’t enjoy reading off of a slide. And yet, many PMMs and sales enablement folks continue to assemble text-heavy corporate slide decks with the soul of a stapler.

Scarier still is when this content doesn’t seem to be rooted in any customer research.

PMM slide decks that fail to grab people’s attention often suffer from:

• Too much text. It’s so easy to create multimedia content now, yet people still make the mistake of writing out their thoughts and dumping them on a slide. The problem is if you ask people to read and listen at the same time, they’ll struggle to do either.
• Theory over real-world examples. Salespeople are desperate for concrete, real-world anecdotes they can share on their calls. If your main sources of research were Google and ChatGPT, it’s no surprise that your content isn’t resonating.
• No obvious customer input. Your audience spends a lot of time talking with customers—and these are the people who matter. If they don’t see or hear that voice in your presentation, they’ll immediately disengage and you’ll lose credibility.

Why customer snippets are so powerful

Customer snippets have become one of my favorite techniques for delivering more engaging training sessions.

They avoid all of the above pitfalls by offering rich, human, reliable content people remember. And they always result in lively training sessions that continue to be revisited by sellers.

Here’s why people stop and listen when you include real customer voices in your work.

• It humanizes your content. You’re transcending from corporate banality into something more movie-like and documentarian. There are now characters involved—and even a fleeting encounter is enough to grab people’s attention.
• It evokes an emotional response. Storytelling is one of the oldest tricks in the book when it comes to captivating an audience. Customer clips that are funny, passionate, or relatable, trigger laughter and empathy. This keeps people listening.
• It adds credibility to your messaging. Hearing stuff from a customer rather than a marketer is always going to feel more real and legitimate. Don’t take this personally, of course—it’s just the way it is.
• It gives people a break from your voice. Customer snippets also just bring variety to the auditory experience. There are, of course, other ways to do that—such as inviting participation from the audience—but playing a clip is way easier to manage and keeps you in control of the session.

The best ways to use customer snippets in sales training

Customer snippets help you to illustrate the problem your product solves, and validate the positioning you are putting forward.

Some common use cases include:

• Buyer personas. Instead of just writing down and explaining what these people’s pain points are, let people hear about them directly from the customer. Customer snippets can be used to support anything from background information about your persona, to pain points and jobs-to-be-done.
• Product launches. What did your beta customers have to say about this new feature? Including excerpts from their feedback can help to educate sellers on the value of the feature. It can also galvanize your team and generate excitement about what’s about to hit the market.
• Competitive intelligence. There’s nothing your teams enjoy more than hearing directly from a customer why your product is so much better than others on the market. Sharing snippets from win/loss interviews, or negative experiences with competitors, goes a long way in supporting your company’s competitive positioning.
• Objection handling. Direct responses from happy customers can help sales reps overcome common objections. You’re giving them ammunition that’s easy to remember and reference when they get pushbank from their prospects.

In terms of format, you have a few options.

• Video. Call recording tools like Zoom, Chorus, Gong, and Outreach, allow you to clip up snippets of customer calls. These can then be embedded into your slides. While video is often seen as the most engaging format, it’s not my personal favorite for this use case. That’s because video can be a bit clunky if you’re presenting remotely—it doesn’t always stream properly when you’re screen-sharing, and it adds a bit of “noise” to your presentation.
• Audio. This is my favorite way to share snippets. The emotion comes across just as well as in a video, you can easily edit the clip down to be super concise, and, best of all, it takes up almost zero space on your slide. I’ll explain how I make these snippets later.
• Text. If the multimedia route isn’t realistic for you, or it’s too much work, you can also just put a quote on your slide in text. I would encourage you to use a photograph of the speaker if possible, since this goes a bit further to humanize the quote and make it real.

What makes a great customer snippet?

For this to work, you need to be able to identify good snippets, and know when to use them. If you’re working with video or audio, you might also have to do some light editing work.

This is what I’ve found makes the best customer snippets for sales presentations:

• Brevity. The definition of snippet is “a small piece or brief extract”. These should be very concise, ideally less than 10 seconds and certainly no more than 30 seconds. Every word counts. People should not have to listen through irrelevant conversation waiting for the punchline. Anything like that should be ruthlessly cut from the snippet.
• Emotion. Remember that you want to engage the audience—and the best way is to evoke their emotions. Customers that are particularly passionate, funny, or intense in the way that they communicate will give you the most memorable snippets. These are more likely to make people feel something, which in turn makes your training easier to recall.
• Purpose. While funny clips work, it’s not enough for them to be funny. They’re not ice-breakers—they’re designed to support your case, highlight a pain point, or arm your sellers with real-world examples they can take to other prospects. Only use snippets that help you achieve the goals of your training—whether that be educating on the value of a new feature or explaining what sets your product apart in the market.
• Typical of your customers. Try to use clips that are typical of the ways your customers tend to communicate. Maybe they contain specific vocabulary that you want your sellers to use as well. Whatever the snippet is about, you’re giving people a window into how your customers communicate.

How to find and collect customer snippets

Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you identify snippets and place them in your presentations.

1. Locate relevant customer call recordings. If you set up your own customer interviews, you’ll know where these records are. You can also leverage your team’s library of call recordings, if they use a sales intelligence platform like Chorus or Gong. If you don’t have specific calls or customers in mind, use keyword search to find examples of customers discussing a certain topic. This should be an important part of your research as a product marketer in any case.
2. Capture impactful snippets. AI-powered call summaries and searchable transcripts make it easier for you to find good quotes. If you’re just grabbing text, it might be as easy as a copy-paste. If you want to take video, your call recording platform usually allows you to create and download snippets of calls. Audio is a bit trickier, but very effective. You can grab audio using a browser plugin like Chrome Audio Capture, or a free audio editing app like Audacity.
3. Edit and save snippets. Trim your snippets if necessary and save them into a folder. I’ve found that sellers often want direct access to the snippets so that they can use them for learning later.
4. Embed them in your sales deck. Whatever software you’re using to create presentations, you can usually embed video and audio quite easily. Just remember that if you are presenting in a conference call using something like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, check that you are sharing with audio enabled before sharing your screen.

Action steps to start using customer snippets in your training

Now that you understand the value of customer snippets and how to collect them, you’re well on the way to creating more engaging presentations.

Here are some steps you can take to put these ideas into motion:

1. Identify key upcoming sales trainings where snippets could enhance engagement. It could be a product launch, industry-specific training, or some competitive analysis.
2. Start collecting clips from recent customer interviews or success calls. Remember to use the tools available to you, such as sales intelligence platforms.
3. Set up a simple process for saving and tagging great snippets. This will get easier the more you do it. Don’t forget to take advantage of AI call summaries and keyword search.
4. Test different formats (text, video, audio) to see what resonates most with your sales team. You can also use a mix of both in the same training—in fact, this will really impress people.
5. Share early wins—track how snippets improve knowledge retention and sales conversations. Ask your team straight-up if they thought the snippets were useful. You’ll quickly get a sense of whether or not it helped to make the training more successful.