› CLIENT LOGIN

Case Studies - Build Your Credibility With Sales Prospects

Bob Patterson
How do you demonstrate the value of your product or service to potential customers? For some, the product is too large or the service too complex, or the user experience too time-consuming to make a demonstration practical. A proven way to overcome these barriers is through the use of case studies. Case studies tell a story illustrating how someone solved a problem or met a challenge using your product or service, and they communicate how that person or company benefited in the process. Case studies have the advantage of communicating a message that may sound overly self-serving and less credible if you said it yourself. Interestingly, when presented by a third party the words can become more compelling to the reader.
Case Study Content
The typical case study follows a proven story line. You start by describing a problem that a customer faced. This problem should be explained in a way that is interesting and relevant to the case study’s expected readership.
You then discuss how the customer approached solving the problem, including what competitive solutions were evaluated. This section has the effect of positioning your company’s product or service among its competitors. Obviously, your customer surveyed other solutions and found yours to be better; explaining the process provides a guide for other prospective customers to form the same conclusion.
Next, the typical case study explains how your product or service was employed by the customer to solve their problem. In the process of this, discussing what challenges needed to be overcome adds an element of human interest to the story. If the case study is to be published in the trade press, the editor will want information of this nature to be included because it helps readers understand how their own experience might go or what to look out for. Quotes from your customer will add interest to this section, but you should make them substantive and relevant. “Company X’s product worked right out of the box” is of marginal interest. A better quote would be “We found Company X’s Y feature very useful because it enabled us to do Z more quickly.”
The Critical Close
Finally, the case study should have a conclusion that crystallizes the value proposition of your product or service to this customer. You should be as quantitative as possible, though getting a firm number from customers is usually hard. Try a few possibilities out on them and see if they will bite. For example, useful conclusions would be “Company X was able to cut their down-time in half” or “Company X was able to increase their productivity by Y%” or even “Company X was able to avoid Y and hence be better able to do Z.” Then if you can back this up with a related customer quote, it will add emphasis to the conclusion. A simple “We were very happy with Company X’s product” is not very interesting. A little work on crafting the concluding paragraph will pay off well, and you’ll have a more compelling title for the piece if you make it relate to the point made in the concluding paragraph, e.g., Company X gets benefit Y from product/service Z.”
Leverage Them Every Way You Can
Case studies can be used in a multitude of ways. As suggested above, many trade press editors are looking for case study articles to fill their editorial calendar opportunities. Having a case study published has the effect of getting an additional “stamp of approval” for your value statement – it signifies that a magazine editor thinks your story has merit for broad audience consumption. Salespeople can also walk through case study info with prospects to establish rapport and build confidence that the prospect’s problem may have a common and effective solution. It may also be worth extracting the essential value statements from a case study, those that summarize a customer’s experience, and featuring that customer or application environment in an advertisement. Finally, putting a case study on your website allows prospective customers to review the info on their own time as they perform due diligence on your company.
As always, tracking returns is very useful. One of our clients has done this by watching their web trend reports during months when case studies were published. For this client, new visitor traffic jumped 42% when their case study was featured in an e-newsletter, online, and in print by an industry publication.
Case studies are valuable marketing tools. Just remember, your readers are smart, so take care in organizing the information and developing an interesting and relevant conclusion.