Question

Topic: Customer Behavior

Can I Incentivise Customer To Give Case Studies?

Posted by ewan.speirs on 5/1/2012 at 7:04 AM ET 125 Points
Our company is a B2B software vendor selling to multi-disciplinary engineering firms specialising in road infrastructure design; well sell software to our customers who use it as a tool to sell their services to the public sector; one of the main challenges we have is obtaining case studies from our customers.

Our research shows us our customers love our product, are very happy with the support services we provide, and 90% would recommend our products to a colleague – however all this positive buy in does not translate to a steady stream of case studies coming through the door and while our customers understand the win-win nature of a good case study I think, in simple terms, they just don’t have the time or can’t allocate the time in their working week to spend on helping us produce case studies. Our customers work on billable hours so time spent on case studies is not time they can charge to a client, in this economic climate they are often overstretched with their services work so providing cases studies is seen as a low value activity as it has no tangible $$ value for them attached to it.

So I really need some creative and effective ideas on how I can encourage or incentivise our customers to provide cases studies given the challenges outlined above – any thoughts/ideas/suggestions for further reading would be very welcome.

Right now I’m leaning towards using a monetary incentive in the form of “case study credits” towards their annual support and maintenance costs to use the software i.e. for each case study they provide I knock X% of their S&M bill when it is up for renewal – appreciate this is dangerously close to buying of our customers but given challenges above I don’t see many options.

Thanks in advance
Ewan
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Peter (henna gaijin) on 5/1/2012 at 12:41 PM Accepted
    Here are two sites with some info that may help you:

    https://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/magazine/5/5/seven-ways-to-...

    https://customerreferencing.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-get-customers-to-he...
  • Posted by mvaede on 5/1/2012 at 1:59 PM Accepted
    simply tell them to invoice you for the time they spend on making the case study for you (max hours/amount) and you incorporate in your marcomm budget or deduct it from their BizDevMarketing budget, should you allocate one....

    Mikael
    B2B Marketing
  • Posted on 5/1/2012 at 8:32 PM Accepted
    Can you interview them, write up the case study yourself (based on the interview), and then let them review what you've written and, if OK, approve it for distribution?

    Or better still, hire one of the experts here who can do this for you. Clients are often reluctant to share stuff with a supplier, but they will gladly do so for an outside third-party. They get to review the write-up before you see anything, even though YOU are paying for the project.

    We've done this several times for clients, and it seems to work pretty well. Contact me via email (in my profile) if you want to discuss.
  • Posted by marketbase on 5/1/2012 at 9:32 PM Accepted
    I personally would not recommend paying a customer to produce a case study for my company. mgoodman's ideas are solid and won't be seen as pandering.
  • Posted by rachikwon on 5/8/2012 at 9:38 AM Accepted
    The problem with this is that you might get false information because they are after the incentives. How about you simplify the process of generating case studies? Provide a form thy can fill out and send them a thank you note, with a token afterwards.
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