Jennifer Marin Jericho. Brand director, facilitator, design leader.
Developing a process for STORYTELLING
A good case study can be used for sales enablement, to build culture, highlight areas of expertise, provide thought leadership, and put your customer’s at the center of your brand, helping them feel like champions for choosing the right partner for their business. Yet, with all its bonuses, effectively executing a case study can be a complex task when you have multiple stakeholders.
PROBLEM: One third of the case studies developed were not getting final approval. To determine why we were struggling to publish all the great stories we were hearing about, I facilitated a virtual meeting to determine the components of a good case study, the benefits and barriers we were facing, and how they were being used after publication.
Almost immediately we were able to see complexity of the process and where we were getting stuck. Our timelines were long, and while the leadership team felt strongly case studies were important, asking our busy sales and customer advocates to keep the project moving forward was leading to long wait times and eventual project abandonment. Our case studies were losing relevancy and urgency the more time passed, the effort being put into developing them was far outweighing the benefits of the case studies.
Out of the 3-4 case studies being developed quarterly, only half of those were making it to distribution. From start to finish it could take up to 4 months for a case study to be finalized.
Removing the complexity of our customer stories
Together with our subject matter experts we decided to create materials that has less barriers to complete. While we would continue to develop case studies that required longer turnaround times, we also chose to find other ways to share out successes. We gathered quotes from our customers and designed social media messages where we could elevate our brand without as much heavy lifting from various internal teams. This small change helps us accelerate the sharing of our customer stories, without compromising the value of our case studies.
Sales Enablement: Sharing out our success stories
Creating a variety of formats for one case study allowed our sales team to pick and choose collateral based on their needs.
To ensure sales was using the content created, we developed social media images, power point templates, and simple 1-2 page documents that sales folks could use to showcase our solutions.
Redesigned the case study web page
Since its redesign we have heard great feedback from sales about how way it is to navigate and find stories to share with our prospects. As we continue to improve this process, we are closely monitoring various metrics on this page to see whether users browse more than one case study when visiting this page.
PROJECTS
Branding + Creative Direction + Facilitation + Product Marketing + Case Study Development