Case Histories are the Best – but You Need Help.
Ask your sales team what kinds of marketing tools work the best in supporting their efforts and, chances are, a lot of them will talk about case histories. Being able to show a prospect how your company solved a problem for a customer with similar challenges to them is a great credibility builder and makes product specs into real solutions. BUT if you’ve ever tried to implement more than an occasional case history, you know how hard it can be.
Your sales engineer’s customer contact may be wildly enthusiastic about letting you describe their case, but will the company’s C suite agree? How about their PR department? If they aren’t agreeable, can the case still be described anonymously and be impressive? And if everyone is on board with the case history, how much will they let you divulge about the problems that led to the solution your company provided? In fact, in case histories, it’s often the “challenge” section that’s the most interesting. This is where you describe the mistakes, limitations, technology issues, etc. that the case history company encountered. Once you delineate the challenges, the fact that your company solved the problem becomes a win in itself. But getting your salespeople who mostly want to talk about how great their products are to understand this can take time, lots of questions and more than one interview.
Bottom line, case histories are complicated, require sensitive contact with both the SMEs and the customers, and may take a long time to complete. It’s not unusual for a case history to be in the marketing pipeline for 6 months or even a year! For a busy in-house marketing team, it’s hard to dedicate that level of detailed follow-up to a program of case histories. That’s when an outside marketing team becomes a worthwhile addition to your efforts. But the outside group has to understand your company technology and brand well enough to be able to speak and write as you.
At Strategies, we’ve implemented complete case history programs for clients, often adding dozens or even over 100 powerful case histories to the client’s marketing arsenal. Here is one example.
