Building Credibility With Your Customers

October / November 2004 By: Casey Hibbard Volume 2 Number 5

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Early stage businesses face challenges from every angle, not the least of which is establishing credibility in the marketplace for their products and services.
Though you may have convincing, professional-looking marketing materials, ultimately prospective customers, partners and investors want the peace of mind that you can deliver what you promise.

Testimonial-based marketing is, undeniably, one of the most effective ways to back up what you boast in your marketing materials. Since the advent of advertising, businesses have used customer testimonials, one- or two-sentence blurbs that capture a customer's satisfaction. For products and services with higher price tags and greater risk, particularly in the B2B arena, buyers need more information to make decisions than a short testimonial provides.

That's when customer case studies, or success stories, can be a particularly powerful addition to your marketing, sales and PR mix. Quite simply, case studies are detailed features on how customers have benefited, putting it in terms of how exactly you helped a customer save time and money, increase productivity, gain competitive advantage or serve customers more effectively.

Many of the nation's leading companies use case studies in their marketing toolkits. Businesses of any size can benefit from such success stories, however, communicating credibility is perhaps even more important for small, emerging companies.

XAware, a software company that graduated from the Colorado Springs Technology Incubator, has used case studies in its marketing, sales and PR from the start.
With each new customer success, the company, which offers XML-based information integration and exchange software, captures the details of projects. It then leverages those stories as sales collateral, on its web site, as content for its newsletters, to pitch to trade publications and to present to investors.

"Case studies are one of the most valuable selling tools available to companies," explained Rick Cloutier, vice president of marketing at XAware. "It's the power of referential selling. If you can prove that you've done it before, then you remove the obstacles to getting a second, third and fourth customer by an order of magnitude."

If you are considering including case studies in your marketing mix, here are some guidelines:

Strategically select featured customers. First, conscientiously select customers to profile. Understandably, you may only have a handful of customers, so you'll simply want to feature a couple of your best early stories.

As your business grows, consider a few factors when selecting customers to feature: name recognition of the company (the bigger the better); whether the company fits a key vertical niche; strong, specific return on investment details; a unique story about how the customer uses your products and services; and finally, a company that doesn't have a policy against publicly endorsing specific products.

Interview the best spokesperson. Different contacts will see different value in your products and services. An IT person will focus on implementation, integration and ease of administration, while business users will value gains in business processes. The interviewee should be in a similar position as the person expected to read the case study.

Create effective interview questions. Questions should cover every subject area that's important to prospects and give them a clear understanding of how the product met a customer's needs. Ask customers about the specific challenges they face, what led them to look for a solution and why they picked your product or service. Then dig into how the service or the product enhanced the customer's business practices. Though you can't always elicit specific ROI, you should try to get approximate numbers by asking very specific questions. For example, how much time does the product, feature or service save a person or team on a daily, weekly or monthly basis compared to the previous method?

Tell a powerful story. Engaging case studies paint clear pictures of the company, its needs and concerns, and how the product or service filled those needs. Match the detail of your case studies to how much information the audience needs. Pepper the story with quotes, break out business benefits with bullets and give it a captivating headline and subheads.

The writer you choose, whether in-house or on contract, should be able to write in a way that's clear, engaging and doesn't lose the reader among a lot of irrelevant technical description. Make sure that the writer fully understands the product and service benefits, and marketing messaging.

Secure approval. Next, send a clean draft of the case study to the customer for review and approval. Incorporate the customer's requested edits until the customer feels comfortable signing off. Depending on your comfort level, you might choose to create a legal release form that indicates the customer's approval, or keep an email record of the approval. If approval drags out, remain patient, but persistent.

Design an attractive case. With an approved editorial case study, it's time to enlist a designer to create a professional-looking layout. Brand it with your logo as well as the customer's logo, and create a clean design that works in print and on the Web, and can be used as a template on all future case studies.
With an attractive, engaging case study, you are ready to begin sharing your customer successes to build credibility with all your audiences.

Casey Hibbard is president of Compelling Cases, Inc., a case study development firm in Santa Fe.