How to create a great case study
When we have surveyed sales teams, asking them, “What sales tool would be the most useful for you?”, they consistently rank case studies at the top of the list. Case studies, or success stories, explain how a product or service has solved someone else’s problem, so prospects can see how it might help them in the same way. It paints a picture of the future if they were to work with you.
How long should a case study be?
Success stories can take different formats that are useful for different types of communications. One-pager case studies are good for initial conversations with a sales prospect, while longer-form, more detailed case studies are useful during the consideration and decision phases of the sales process. Case studies can be delivered as PDF, or they can be formatted as a presentation that you talk through with a potential customer. They can even be created as videos.
What should it include?
The content flow should always include:
- Problem: Identify the customer issue you solved
- Solution: Explain the services or products your customer used
- Outcome: Describe the business impact and how the solution helped them achieve their goals
With either short or long-form case studies, they should be skimmable: the key points should be easy to identify through use of subheads, callouts, and graphics. While people want the type of proof it provides, they usually won’t take the time to read a text-heavy piece that isn’t broken up into digestible portions.
How many do we need?
For case studies to be effective, they need to be relatable. That’s why it’s often helpful to identify a set for the sales team to draw from, based on who they are talking to. You may structure the library by service or product offering, or you may frame them from the customer’s perspective by developing a set of case studies by industry. That way, when a salesperson is talking to someone in the healthcare industry, for example, they can pick up the healthcare case studies to share–making them more relevant to the potential customer.
Going even further, you could create subsets by company size–perhaps you have a large and a small healthcare client you can highlight–so that the success stories best represent the type of client you’re talking to. Ultimately, you could tailor case studies by buyer persona–creating a subset of case studies for each industry based on roles within the target company.
What makes a case study effective?
Success story content should be framed with a prospect’s point of view in mind. They don’t care about the details of the engagement with another customer, they just want to know that they have a similar problem, and you provided a solution that resulted in a beneficial outcome. So, while you don’t need to get into the nitty gritty, you should share the process you followed and quantifiable results whenever possible. The key is to strike the right balance between just the right amount of context with real data.
