As marketers we get asked to write all kinds of documents, but case studies are particularly painful for most of us. They're tough to schedule, they take a long time to finalize and the field is always clamoring for more. In fact, you can never have enough according to sales. Even if you have a willing, able and interesting customer, case studies are difficult to push through to completion by no fault of the writer, instead is the approval requirements and historical approach which makes it tough. Even if you are lucky enough to get a written case study complete and signed off by a customer, you have to wonder "will sales actually use them once they are done?"
While sales is always looking for new and interesting leave behinds, many times case studies just don't fit the bill once complete. With differences in industries, the product deployment mix and other factors it's difficult to get an "exact match" this is often what sales is hoping for - a document which closes the deal because it fits the prospects scenario perfectly. Sometimes we can get real close though, but even when the implementation stars align they still may not be used in the field. Main driver is our case studies are many times fact free, devoid of numbers and generally represent a feel good piece about your product or company which doesn't help a prospect to decision anything or discern why they should further evaluate your product/solution.
Good News Sales Has Some Case Study Candidates!
The typical case study process starts with a sales feedback session and as you would suspect - they need more stuff, not just the potential case study from the potential customers for the case study, but they will use that time to give you a laundry list of items while they have you. We can always debate if they ACTUALLY need more stuff, but the general reality is "why wouldn't you want more case studies anyhow?", right? After all, sales is kind enough to give you a handful of companies to talk to, but 99% in the list can't do one due to some corporate policy or some other reason like being too busy, but if you are lucky you can find that one which says "yeah we can do a case study if you want".
It may not be the one you wanted, it's in a corner case industry for your product, but it's the one you got and the next time you talk to sales it's like: "Victory! We have a case study in progress and we are working with the customer".
Ready, Set, Write!
So it's off to the races and it's a pretty straight forward process for the writer who's been assigned to get it done:
If done internally there are additional steps:
Providing you are lucky enough to get final approval, it is likely the content you started with is different and less valuable once it has gone through the customer's marketing mill. I've seen "end products" which were some watered down document which won't really help sales. Many times the content is shaped a little like the outline below:
There could be any number of reasons why this happens, the contact wasn't the right one, we asked the wrong questions or we just couldn't get the cool content through their legal team. It just might be because many interviews for case studies aren't discovery sessions around how well the implementation went, it's a checklist of questions the writer goes through - probably the same checklist they used at another company.
After all it's just another sales tool right?.
Asked, Answered and Creating Content
In some companies it's an internal writer and at others they may leverage external third parties to write the case study. The most typical approach is to go in with a list of questions and just work your way through a checklist of questions with no real involvement from Product Marketing or Management. It's not that the list of questions are wrong, you have to start somewhere, but it is typically driven by historical points of reference and a list of best practices which they downloaded from a blog on "How to Write a Case Study". Case studies after all are pretty formulaic for most companies.
Now that you have the answers to the questions we have the makings for a case study right? Maybe, maybe not. So what can you do to improve the likelihood that you will have something of value when done? Focus on creating content with the answers, not necessarily a case study and then evaluate how to use it.
Conversations, not Checklists
The best approach to create content from your customer implementations is not to go in search of case studies, but to have regular conversation with recent implementations and find out how folks are actually using your product. Create relationships with your customers and conversations. While having these conversations you just might find a real case study, a customer focus blog post or other quicker to write (and get approved) web content piece which would help buyers in the discovery process better understand the problems solved by your solutions/product.
The reality is that videos, blog posts and custom testimonials on your web site can be just as helpful for sales. In the end, sales is looking for proof-points not propaganda and any fact based overview they can point to online or provide a link to can be just as helpful and just might not take a year to get through the through the marketing and legal mill at your customer organization.
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Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. .. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.
(Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, On Philosophy of Education)
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