Customer Success Stories Speed the Sale
Marketing and Sales worked hard to find the opportunity and close the deal. The people in Operations knocked themselves out to deliver above expectations. It's been a year or more since the relationship began, and your client is patting himself on the back for taking the risk to invest into your solutions.
As you say to yourself "I told you so," are you wondering how many other companies have the same needs as this client? Similar reservations?
Moreover, are you missing other sales opportunities because some of your most promising prospects don't know about all of your services—or don't fully recognize the value to their businesses?
Would these companies be more likely to buy if they knew how others have benefited from your services? If so, maybe it's time to tell them.
Better yet, let your current clients do the talking. But make it easy for them to share their experiences with a wide audience. Launch a customer case study program.
What Is a Customer Case Study?
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Comments
Excellent article. Not only do we create success stories for our business, we help our clients do the same.
Good read
Having a customer case study to highlight at least one success story for every service or product line a company provides is a must and ultimately, the more you can create the better! Within each case study it adds credibility to include quotes from multiple individuals from your customer’s company, namely executive staff and those that actually work with the product or service. Including quotes from these individuals provides multiple perspectives to the reader.
In addition to the valuable recommendations provided in this article, it should also be noted that it is best to post a case study to a company’s Web site as an HTML file versus a PDF. Though search engines can still find and read a PDF file, it is more easily done when the file is HTML. Be mindful of the URL used for the case study file as well. A URL that lists all or the main portion of the case study title or headline will further help prospects to find it more easily when performing a Web search. A sample URL format might be: http://www.domain.com/casestudy/headline-of-the-case-study
I don't question the value of a customer case study, but I wonder if it is appropriate for blogs. Blogs are generally supposed to be 2-way conversations...I don't see how customer case studies foster any conversations at all. In my mind customer case studies should be kept separate from blogs, but I'm hoping you can convince me otherwise. ; )
-Kyle
twitter.com/kyleroussel
Great article! We take a very similar approach. Getting to "yes" is easy when the customer knows upfront that they have final review and approval before publication.
We've also found case studies to be a good door opener for customers to serve as press references, and often repackage the story into a press release. We ask the customer about the "must reads" for his/her market so that we can promote the success story not only to our client's top publications, but to the customer's as well. Makes the customer feel even better about getting direct benefit from their time spent.
Thanks for a very informative article. While many of us marketers already know at least part of the concept, it's always nice to see a complete writeup on the subject.
I think the last section "Why You Can Never Have Too Many Customer Success Stories" is especially important. Customer success stories, while usually relegated to the back end of a project (more often than not as an afterthought if we have time), should be included as part of a project's plan. It can serve as a final summary of a project and as such will motivate everyone involved to do the best job they can - sort of like a final report for the project.
Good article, in the current economic client, producing a case study is a great cost effective way of marketing. As a marketing expert in the UK, I always recommend that our clients develop great relationships with their customers and produce marketing case studies. It is also something that we do ourselves and make sure that we have case studies on our website, so that potential clients can see that we really do know what we are talking about. It can be pain to sit down, contact the customer, ask the questions and put together a case study but it is well worth it, and if you publish on your website, it costs you nothing except your time. www.brightermarketing.com
And what about if your competition also benefits from the case study?
How this can be prevented?
Hi,
I just logged back in after receiving another link to our article from Marketing Profs and was delighted to see all the helpful comments. I'd like to respond here to a few of the questions posed:
1. How are case studies applicable to blogs?
Kyle noted that blogs should engender two way conversation and asked how case studies could accomplish that end. My experience is that everyone prefers reading a story because it helps them visualize the concept the author/blogger is trying to convey. For that reason, I believe mini-case studies (a quick paragraph) can communicate a concept quickly--and add instant credibility. As for longer case studies, they, too, can stimulate conversation. For example, if the case study "dilemma" and/or "industry" is relevant to the community, members may respond with solutions they've tried--or how they've improved upon what worked for the featured company.
2. How do you keep your competition from benefiting from your case studies?
This raises an excellent question. In general, I don't worry too much about the competition. If you've done a good job of exceeding your customers' expectations they won't abandon you. Moreover, case studies will help you attract their competition--since you've proven that you can deliver results. That said, years ago, based on a review of a competitors' case studies, I learned of an attractive market segment that my client was not currently pursuing--and today that is still the core of this client's business. The key is that you have options in how you write and deploy case studies. So, you can weigh the costs and benefits of various paths before moving full steam ahead. You may decide to write one case study for every industry but only hand them out when prospects start questioning ROI--or your ability to fulfill the promises you've made. Or, you may only use them to attract press attention. The press tends to do their own interviews and just use snippets as part of a larger and/often different story. I'd, however, try to use them as broadly as possible. The exception may be when you're first to market and smarter, or better capitalized companies, can take what your findings and move down the learning curve faster.