Recently, a client faced an interesting challenge. The company was a global organization that sold its solution into massive global accounts. At that time, the company was attempting to move its globally distributed sales force away from a sales model that focused on selling products to become more of a “trusted advisor.” The idea was to get in front of the customer far earlier in the sales cycle so the company could influence the customers’ RFP, rather than being called in after the RFP was already fully developed.
The company had just successfully completed a major deal with an important client in North America using this model. Now it wanted to overcome the inertia inherent in the sales process to replicate this success across a large organization.
One answer they came up with was a case study. But this wasn’t just any case study….
Normally, companies write case studies to publicize their successes externally to the outside world. While the company would have loved to do an external case study, when a customer is very large, it can be very difficult to get approval from the customer to move forward. Because the story was so valuable, the company therefore decided to do an internal case study that it could use to share the knowledge its salesforce gained during the sales cycle with the rest of the global sales force.
The Knowledge-Transfer Process
To create this internal case study, we held a series of conference calls with all of the major internal players who had helped prepare and close the deal. These included all the sales reps involved throughout the process, as well as the technical sales and implementation specialists.
Based on these interviews, the final case study included information on:
· Background of the customer
· The customer’s business challenges
· Technical challenges
· The company’s that this vendor competed against to win the deal
· A blow-by-blow description of the process the vendor went through to win the deal, which included providing early-stage consulting and performing a bake-off at a purpose-built technical lab
· The key solution capabilities and vendor characteristics that caused the customer to select the vendor
· The deal size
· The significance of the win
· Key success factors in the win
· Lessons learned
· How the vendor implemented the solution at the customer site
· Future/ongoing upselling opportunities
· Project status
The case study was told in a compelling fashion, as a story that highlighted the uphill struggle the sales team faced in implementing the new sales strategy and how it ultimately prevailed against large obstacles to win the deal.
While most case studies are outward facing, an internal case study can help companies preserve institutional knowledge and share it. In this way, these case studies can greatly speed the adoption of new processes throughout a large organization.
How has your company used internal case studies?
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