A client once, jokingly, said to me: “Creating our customer case studies would be so much easier if we didn’t have to find the right customer”
We all know that feeling.
You may have already run a case study of your big-name customer or the one with the most impressive results. And now you need to create another case study, and you’re stuck on where to find the right customer for it.
Not to worry, you probably already have several potentials; you just need to take a different approach to find them. Here are a few ideas to help you.
Who has experienced a change worth talking about?
It doesn’t have to be a major change. You’re looking for a customer who might have said to someone at your company, “We used to spend three days every month pulling reports manually, and now we get the information in an hour.”
They’ll be able to explain:
- What life looked like before
- What made them look for a solution
- What was difficult or frustrating
- What changed afterwards
- What they can do now which they couldn’t before
Who felt the pain of the problem?
These customers have a strong emotional connection to the problem you solved. I don’t mean this in a soap-opera type way, more that the issue was causing them a lot of stress and keeping them up at night. We all remember those times vividly.
How can you find them? Ask your teams if they can remember customers:
- Who was struggling with an issue before they bought?
- Who was under a lot of pressure to find a solution?
- Who said: “I can’t tell you how pleased we are not to have to worry about this anymore”?
Who can tell their story in their own voice?
You know these customers. They’re natural storytellers who can explain the ins and outs of their experience in their own words.
They often have great anecdotes and quotes that can lift a case study, especially when it’s on a technical topic. They can also be a good bridge to other people at your customer’s company who find it harder to talk about these things.
People like the person who uses your solution every day or whose job has just become a lot easier. Being interviewed for a case study might feel like a formal process for them, and everything comes out as corporate speak.
By having a chat with your source, they’ll feel more relaxed, and you’ll get the quotes and information you need for your case study.
Whose context the prospect will recognise themselves in
The key here is who will be reading your case study. If it’s prospects with global operations, then a big customer talking about how they: “Transformed our global operations” is more relatable than a smaller one talking about how they’ve “Transformed our staff rota system.”
All this said, sometimes you have a smaller customer who is a perfect fit because the issue they had affects large and small companies alike.
Who’d benefit from the visibility?
An unusual one. You might have a customer who values being seen as an innovator or leader in their field. Maybe you designed a bespoke product for this customer that could also help other companies. Or one of your products was used in a new way to solve a problem.
There are all sorts of possibilities, and these customers can be keen to take part in a case study or success story because it gives them something they can use for their business.
You now have five ways to find potential customers for your case study. With any luck, this has inspired more ideas, making the tricky task of finding the right one a little bit easier.
Stakeholders and others, understandably, prefer to use big-name customers for case studies; however, this means that many other, just-as-good or even better ones get overlooked because they don’t fit that criterion.
And there’s another positive side to this approach. If you’re sending case studies to the media, it can help them stand out. Journalists are used to seeing big-name companies. When they read about a smaller company that solved a problem that they know their readers are facing, they’re more likely to get in touch with your company.
Now you’ve found the perfect customer for your case study, how do you persuade them to take part? That’s the topic of my next post.
I’m Sara Edlington, a B2B technology case study writer.
With twenty years in tech journalism behind me (The Times, The Independent, StrategicRISK Europe), now I help B2B technology companies turn customer success into stories that prospects recognise themselves in. If your customers have a story worth telling, either get in touch or find out how I can help you.