Before pushing your products into the buyer’s basket, Product marketers need to build trust with the prospective buyers, and one such strategy is creating a practical case study.
However, most of the time, product marketers and CEOs are so passionate about their product and tech offering that the entire case study is built around the product features and functionalities rather than the outcome or the benefits of the offering.
Based on my experience, here are a few of the steps I would recommend for building a good case study, especially for B2B SaaS products:
- Relevance to the Audience: Understand that value is subjective. You can start your case study by identifying the right target audience and highlighting what truly matters to them in their decision-making process.
- Audience and Journey Identification: Determine the functional role you are addressing and where they are in the buyer's journey. I think knowing the audience and their stage in the purchasing decision is essential before drafting the case study.
- Crafting a Compelling Storyline: Choose a narrative that revolves around the challenges faced by your client and how these challenges were overcome, resulting in defined business outcomes.
- Value Capture through Interviews: During interviews with your customer, capture value by delving into their experience with the product implementation, working with your organization, and their internal decision-making process. Pose questions from the customer's perspective, exploring what they valued and how they assessed that value throughout the buying and implementation phases.
- Quantifiable Outcomes: Emphasize that the best outcomes are those that speak to the prospect's primary concerns and are quantifiable or measurable. Highlight values such as business growth, cost savings, time efficiency, ease of implementation, or positive support experiences.
- Thorough Customer Interviews: Invest adequate time in interviewing customers about their experiences with the implementation and collaboration with your organization. It would help if you probed your client into their internal processes and the reasons behind choosing your company as their preferred vendor. Frame questions from the customer's viewpoint to gather all relevant information for building compelling case studies.
- Design Importance: Last but not least, the design of the case study is equally important. I have seen many crucial B2B business case studies that could have been better designed and could hardly impact the purchase process.
A well-planned, well-structured interview can yield multiple storylines for use in multiple buyer types and stages of the buying process.
Please get in touch with me for a questionnaire for customer interviews and case study formats.
