Study of a Case Study

It’s always a pleasure to work with bright, motivated young marketing professionals. The only thing they are missing is experience, and sometimes this leads to poor planning and missed deadlines when they discover yet another situation where the classroom fails to reflect real life. Given recent discussions with some colleagues and clients, I am starting to think that this blog should be about sharing those hard-learned lessons that experience can teach you. So this blog entry is about working on case studies.  

When a company wants a really effective sales tool, there are not many kinds of collateral that deliver as much impact as a well-written case study. A case study contains so many positive elements: it’s a customer testimonial; it helps prospects relate to a real-life situation; it can be used as content for a website; it can be content for a company or customer newsletter; it can be pitched to publications as a feature article. If published, the magazine reprints make an even stronger selling piece, since it implies editorial approval.

Despite the high value of case studies, there have been very few times in my career where a case study assignment has been a smooth, uninterrupted process. Why is it so difficult to actually write a case study? Because the stars that need to be in alignment are mostly outside your control. So before you hire a writer to work on “a bunch of case studies”, only to have this resource sitting and waiting for the go-ahead, here is the project workflow. In an ideal world, of course.

Communicate your plan to Sales. Salespeople are always eager to promote their successes. Have them nominate customers who would make good case study candidates. Unless Marketing has a direct relationship with the customer contact, ask Sales to sell the case study idea to the customer and provide you with an introduction to the contact who will work with you on the story. You want to avoid situations where you build plans around a customer who turns out to be ‘not ready’.

Confirm that the customer’s company policy allows case studies. Companies are more wary than ever of talking about their operations or recommending vendors in public. If their industry or company is under scrutiny, PR activities come to a standstill (except for damage control) and only the highest priority activities get any attention. Helping to promote a vendor does not come under the list of priorities, even at the best of times. But if the company is open to a case study, find out what the parameters are. Sometimes there are no guidelines, it’s a “let’s see what you come up with” situation, and the story goes to their Marketing and Legal departments for review on a case by case basis.

Communicate your plans to the Customer. It’s good to prepare briefing notes for your customer contact, to make his/her job easier if the idea needs to be sold to the customer’s organization. Include the general intent of the story – the classic is to describe a challenge, the solution requirements, the solution deliverables and implementation, the happy situation afterwards. Include how the story will be used: in a data sheet, on the website, as a contributed article to a certain publication.

Build in lead time for customer reviews. You may have pre-sold the story idea to a publication, and your friendly editor is on deadline and waiting for your story. Legal and Marketing approval from a customer can take longer than writing the story, and you want the friendly editor to stay friendly, so avoid making deadline promises you can’t keep.

Project manage the process. Your writer has to develop the case study with help from various subject matter experts (SME). The salesperson provides some background on the before and after, Marketing provides messaging and the benefits to highlight, the systems engineer outlines the implementation challenges, the customer contact provides their view of how your product has vastly improved productivity and delivered on cost savings. The customer is only one SME; the others are from your own organization and probably very busy. You need to help make the connections happen. Then, once the story goes to the customer for review, you or someone with job title clout needs to track the review and approval process. Nudge things along in a professional, courteous way.

Follow up and get more case studies. I can pretty much guarantee that if you started out with a list of ten case study candidates, that even if you do everything right, a few will opt out along the way. Or get too busy to work with you. No problem. Maintain a list of case study candidates, both new customers and the existing ones who opt out. Follow up to find out if their situation has changed. The goal is to have an ongoing case study program so you can freshen up your website and collaterals with new stories. Ping Sales regularly to find out if they have any customers who would make good case studies.

When to work on case studies. I recommend initiating a case study with the customer shortly after your solution has been installed. The project will still be top-of-mind with the customer and you’ll get more attention. Their implementation team will still be there for a few months after it goes live, their impressions will be fresh, and they are going to be as eager as you to promote their success. It’s still honeymoon time. Wait a year and that team or manager may have been transferred to another project and you’ll be speaking to a newcomer who lacks knowledge about the original reasons for bringing in the solution, and who may not be as positive.

Perhaps you are both writer and project manager for some case studies. Well, as you can see, writing the story is the least of your challenges.