High-Tech Communicator

What’s Your Philosophy of Writing?

The other day, I was talking to a marketing manager at a large technology company about a potential writing project. Usually, in an initial get-to-know-you phone meeting, marketing people will ask what types of projects I do and how I work—all  very tactical questions. But this woman asked instead, “What’s your philosophy?”

“Wow! That’s refreshing,” I thought. “No one’s ever asked me that before.”

Her question gets to people’s perception of writers. Often, people look at writing as a tactical task where the writer strings together sentences and polishes up the grammar. But when that’s all a writer does, marketers are invariably unhappy with the results and become distrustful of all writers. As one content expert recently noted, “Many writers seem to just not understand the topics, so while they may be grammatical experts, they destroy the message.”

By asking me my philosophy, this woman was saying that she understood that writing is a complex and strategic function that goes beyond stringing together sentences.

So What’s My Philosophy?

My writing philosophy centers around the type of writing I do and the process of writing.

Writing Types

With the idea of content marketing spreading like wildfire, marketers are actively looking to create content that describes how their solution helps people operate their businesses or do their jobs more effectively. The idea is that customers are actively looking for solutions for problems on the web and it behooves marketers who want to attract customers to give them what they’re looking for.

I come from a background of service journalism. In other words, I started out writing articles for niche publications that in some way, shape, or form provided information that helped people operate their businesses or do their jobs better. Whether it was a case study that showed how one business solved a particular problem, a comparative review of multiple products in a single category, or a trend piece that described changes an organization needed to be aware of, all of the articles I wrote always had a service bent. The white papers, case studies and other materials I write typically reflect that focus.

Writing Process

To create the type of materials I focus on, the writing process comes down to gaining a true understanding of the message the client wants to disseminate and then translating that into a piece that has meaning to the customer. The process is sort of like translating poetry from one language to another. This is more complex than it looks. After all, think about what would happen if you ran a poem through translation software. You’d get gibberish.

Why?  

Most poems are chock full of obscure references. If you don’t understand the references, you don’t understand the poem. But when you get a good professor to explain the poem, a whole new world opens up.

Similarly, pieces about technology contain all sorts of jargon, acronyms, and obscure references.

So for papers where the content is well defined, such as a white paper based on a sales presentation, the job of a writer is to be the poetry professor and translate the “poem” (in this case the technology) into language that students can understand. Since I’m not really an expert at any one technology, I do deep background research looking up obscure articles explaining the technology until I “get it” enough to explain to someone else.

But for many white papers, the client only has a 30,000-foot view of what they want to say. In that case, I need to come up with most of the content from scratch through interviews and research. I then shape it into something that meets the client’s criteria and that readers can understand.

So to summarize, what’s my philosophy to create value?

1. Create service-type pieces that help customers do their job or run their business better
2. Find out in a deep way what the client is really trying to say.
3. Make sure I get all the background I need to truly understand the message.
4. Learn what the customer wants to know and translate the message in such a way that the customer understands the value of my client’s message.

And that’s how writers add value to content during the writing process.

What’s your philosophy about producing marketing materials?

 

Stories that Work for Business

In my last post, I talked about how stories make your marketing materials more powerful by telling people how to act and motivating them to do so. There are types of stories, so called story templates, that have been proven effective.

While there are many types of story templates, the Challenge plot is particular apropos for marketing content.

The Challenge Plot is basically a David versus Goliath story. The protagonist overcomes a formidable challenge and succeeds. David fells a giant with his homemade slingshot. Variations of the challenge story include: the underdog story, the rags-to-riches story, and the triumph of willpower over adversity.

The key element of the challenge plot is that the obstacles seem daunting to the protagonist. They inspire us by appealing to our perseverance and courage. They make us want to work harder, take on new challenges, overcome obstacles—and act.

Why the Challenge Plot?

The challenge plot works well for marketing communications because most marketing pieces ultimately describe ways that your product helps solve problems for customers. When you can take people through the thought process of someone who is using your products to solve real world problems, people tend to see themselves as the protagonist of the story. And the more you can get people to visualize themselves with this problem and see themselves solving it using your solution, the more likely you are to get them to consider using your product because it’s almost as if they already use it.

What types of stories have you used to market your business?

Use Stories to Turbo Charge Your Marketing Materials

Once upon a time, there was a multi-billion dollar software company that developed and sold products that manage the IT infrastructure for large companies. This company typically sold its products to IT types using old-school marketing. In other words, its marketing touted features and functions.

One day, a VP came into the company that wanted to experiment with the new-fangled concept (to the company) of marketing and selling not product features, but solutions for vertical industries.

Now this VP of Industry Solution Sales knew that his reputation was on the line. His approach had to work or he’d be out of a job.

So when one of the VPs of Marketing hired me to write one of the company’s first industry-specific marketing pieces, for the financial services industry, the VP of Industry Solution Sales immediately jumped on the phone to call me and make sure I got it right.   

Over the course of a two-hour conversation, not only did this VP of solution sales go over the messaging he wanted to convey, he told me stories to illustrate each message and why it could help customers in that industry. They weren’t long stories, but they helped me understand each point clearly. I was able to turn around and use the stories to convey the material in the piece in an easy-to-understand manner.   

The piece went on to become a smashing success and others in the company used it as the model for many subsequent, successful pieces.  

Why Stories?

Not only was the introduction to this blog about stories, it was itself a story. Stories can be extremely powerful tools when used in marketing materials. Marketing is all about getting people to take action—whether that action is to get more information about your product or to actually purchase it. And stories are a powerful tool for inspiring people to take action.   

The book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” by Dan Health and Chip Heath offers some fascinating observations about how stories get people to act. The book discusses how stories can provide both the knowledge people need about how to act and the motivation to do so.  

Informing people how to act—By showing step-by-step how someone else dealt with a particular situation or challenge, stories give people enough information so that they can mentally test how they would’ve handled the situation.

When we hear a story, we’re not being passively entertained. We simulate it in our heads. Mental simulation works because we can’t imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity. For example, brain scans show that when people imagine a flashing light, they activate the visual area of the brain; when they imagine someone tapping on their skin, the activate tactile areas of the brain.

Mental simulation helps with problem-solving. Even in mundane planning situations, mentally simulating an event helps us think of things we might otherwise have neglected. Mental simulation is not as good as actually doing something, but it’s the next best thing. Stories are like flight simulators for the brain. A story is powerful because it provides the context missing from abstract prose. Stories put knowledge into a framework that’s more lifelike.

When you’re trying to get people to act, the way you deliver the information is important. Stories are much more effective in getting people to act than simple arguments. If you make an argument, you’re implicitly asking people to evaluate that argument, judge it, debate it, criticize it, and then argue back—at least in their minds. But with a story, you engage the audience—you’re involving people with the idea and asking them to participate with you.

Stories also help people focus on potential solutions. Telling stories with visible goals and barriers shifts the audience into a problem-solving mode. In other words, stories help people solve problems for themselves. And as anyone who has used the Socratic Method knows, people are always more likely to accept an idea if they think they’ve come up with it themselves.

Stories as motivation to act—We empathize with the characters and start cheering them on when they confront their problems. This gives us an emotional connection with the characters. When the protagonist in the story triumphs despite great odds, it inspires us to do the same.

When you think of an inspiring story, you may think that story needs to be a dramatic tale of life and death—like man versus nature (a la “Moby Dick” or even the “Biggest Loser.”) But even seemingly boring stories about solving business problems using a software application can be highly effective if your reader has the problem described. So use stories whenever possible when you want to improve the effectiveness of your marketing materials.

How has telling stories improved your marketing materials?

Is it Worthwhile to Create “Blind” Case Studies?

Customer success stories are a highly effective marketing tool for B2B vendors because they provide proof that the vendor’s solutions do what they say they do. However, getting customers to agree to work with you on a success story is often a challenge.

If a customer won’t cooperate, should you write the story anyway without using the customer’s name? After all, the sales rep can always drop the customer name in conversation even if they can’t include the name in the written document.

Here are the factors to consider when deciding for or against a blind case study:

Against

Clearly a customer name and endorsement is the most powerful proof point. If you don’t have that, you lose a significant portion of the value of the case study.

For

That said, some customers, particularly large companies that often make the most desirable success stories, have policies forbidding them from providing endorsements. For example, Wal-Mart never provides endorsements.

Also, many industries will never provide endorsements because of possible regulatory or competitive concerns; for example, life sciences companies or other research-based companies often refuse to provide endorsements. Other companies don’t provide endorsements because the vendor’s product provides a critical competitive advantage and they don’t want to give away competitive secrets.

What to do?

In my opinion, and in those of many of my clients, it’s worth it to produce the case study even without attribution. This is because stories are an extremely powerful way to convey information.

• People pay to attention stories.
• Stories provide highly concrete examples that make your products’ benefits much easier to understand.  
• Stories are memorable—people are much more likely to remember information if it’s told in the form of a story.
• The right story can inspire people to action.

So by all means, start by getting case studies from customers willing to give their name. But if they won’t, and they have a particularly interesting story, consider writing a “blind” case study.

What’ve been your experiences with blind case studies?

How to Choose Customers for Case Studies

Case studies are extremely powerful marketing tools. But how do you choose the right customers to profile for case studies to make the most of limited marketing dollars?

Here are some of the criteria companies use to identify the most strategic case studies:   

Star Power

If the customers you’re going after Fortune 500 companies, you’ll certainly want the legitimacy that having case studies from big name customers will provide. Certainly, I have plenty of clients chasing after these big names.

However, beware that these are the most difficult to line up and can result in wasted resources. Many large companies have policies that prohibit them from endorsing other vendors’ products—thus be prepared to expend much more time and effort finding big companies willing to do a case study. Even if a company says they do case studies, approvals may be withheld at the last minute, often with no explanation. This can result in wasted money for stories that are never approved. You can minimize (but never completely eliminate) this risk by determining in advance the company’s policy on case studies, who’s in charge of the project, and ask their permission before beginning the process.  

Target Industries

Often, customers are concerned about whether you understand their specific industry—whether that’s manufacturing, retail, or life sciences. Creating case studies about customers in all of the industries that constitute your target markets will ensure you have the right materials on hand to alleviate those concerns.   

Product Line

Clearly, you’ll want case studies for each product in your product line so you can demonstrate your success in delivering promised benefits for each product.

Geographic Area

Some companies target case studies geographically. For example, one client that markets to physicians  highlights customers practicing in each region of the country.  

ROI

ROI can be extremely difficult to quantify. In many cases, companies that want a lot of case studies will produce some that highlight qualitative benefits. Still, make sure that some of your case studies demonstrate strong quantifiable ROI. 

Momentum

In many cases, quality will be more important than quantity. If resources are an issue, you don’t really need dozens of case studies that illustrate the same point. It’s better to make sure you have at least one case study for each key product, target market, or other initiative. At the same time, some companies find it very important to demonstrate momentum and adoption in their marketplace. One way to meet these requirements is to create customer press releases; short and sweet descriptions about your new customers and why they’re choosing your products and release them on an ongoing basis over the wire services. 

Miscellaneous

Every once in awhile, I’ll come across a unique reason to create a case study or customer press release. For example, one company produced customer press releases and case studies specifically about customers who had come to them after defecting from their main competitor. This was an interesting exercise because no customer will allow you to directly say that they dumped a previous vendor in your favor.  What you can do is produce a standard case study or press release about these customers. And presumably, the sales rep can fill in the missing details in one-on-one conversations.

Another customer had come from a business that had evolved over time from a document printing company to one that automated document processes. A prize case study for them was one that covered the entire automated process, rather than individual automated capabilities.

Companies produce case studies for many reasons. When you’re looking for customers to profile, chose the ones that are most strategic for your business.

How does your organization select customers to profile with case studies?

 

How to Conduct Effective Interviews for Powerful Customer Success Stories

Most technology vendors understand that customer success stories provide critical proof of the effectiveness of your solutions in delivering on their promises. Interviews are your most important tool for getting the material you need to create great customer success stories.

How can you get the information you need to develop the most effective case studies possible while making the most of your customers’ time effectively?

Here’s the process I use to make sure that I get a full understanding of how a customer benefits from a particular technology solution so that I can create powerful case studies: 

1.    Come up with a list of standard interview questions. Most customer success stories are straightforward. They incorporate standard sections such as the business problem that the customer faced, why they chose their particular solution, the implementation process, how the customer uses the solution, and the key qualitative and quantitative benefits the customer achieved. A questionnaire that asks about each of these issues is a good start for your interview questions.

2.    Modify the list of questions for each product. While you never want to put words in the customer’s mouth because that will make the case study seem inauthentic, you want case studies to reflect your messaging and positioning wherever possible. Make sure your questions touch on all of the key capabilities and benefits you typically emphasize in your messaging.  Customers often experience product benefits but forget to mention them. By specifically asking about these benefits, you can jog their memory about benefits that they’ve experienced that may not be top-of-mind.  

3.    Determine specific ROI metrics. Determine what ROI metrics are critical to support your messaging and put them on the list of questions. For example, if your product is time and attendance software, ask about how much customers reduced their costs by eliminating payroll re-runs due to more accurate time and attendance data. An electronic health record vendor might want to look at the number of staff hours saved per week from eliminating the need to manually pull paper patient files.

4.    Ask open ended questions. While you need to have your list of questions at the ready, it’s also important to find out what capabilities and benefits are most important to the customer. This information will enable you to determine what to emphasize in your story. To obtain this information, start by asking open ended questions. For example, ask what were the most important benefits the customer experienced by implementing your product.  

5.    Take advantage of a moment of silence. When someone stops talking, give them a moment of silence before you jump in with your next question. People abhor a vacuum in the conversation and will often come up with another idea that they might have forgotten in if you rushed them with your next question. In the same vein, once someone seems to have run out of steam on a particular topic, I ask them if there’s anything else they want to add. Often I get the most interesting information from the off the cuff responses they give to this question.

6.    Now ask specific questions. Once you’ve found out what’s important to the customer, review your list of questions to be sure to cover all the bases. 

7.    Find out how specific processes worked before and after the product was implemented. Many software products are highly abstract and it’s easy for a reader to get lost.  I like to get as specific and detailed a picture of how the customer uses the product and how they benefitted as possible. Therefore, I always ask customers to describe a particular work process and how they performed this process before using the software and after the implementation.  Another way to get specific information is to ask them to describe a particular time they used the product and how it helped them. For example, ask customers to describe one time that they used the product to solve a particular problem, how it helped solve the problem, and why the solution was better than the way they did things before.

8.    Ask why the changes were important to the business. Whenever customers describe a benefit, ask them to go one step further and tell you why that benefit was important to the business. For example, if the customer says that the product makes their workers more productive, ask them whether that added productivity allows them to spend more time improving customer service or serving more customers without adding employees.  

By using a judicious mix of open-ended questions, specific questions, and moments of silence, you’ll be able to get the information you need to produce a great case study without taking more of your customers’ time (and patience) than necessary. And because people usually love talking about themselves, chances are, your customers will have a great time during the process.

How have you improved your customer interviews?  

Make the Most of Your Content: 13 Ways to Repurpose Existing Materials

Despite the alleged economic recovery, marketing budgets remain tight. Yet, as industry publications shrink and become less critical gateways for distributing your messages, you must publish more of your own content to get your messages out to buyers.

How can you create more content for less dollars?

Like the thrifty and creative domestic god/goddess who can squeeze six meals out of a single chicken, you can make your content budget go a lot farther if you repurpose your existing content assets.

Here are some of the many ways I’ve worked with clients to breathe new life into existing content:

1 - 8. Customer Stories

Interviews with customers can give you a jackpot of content. From a single customer interview you can obtain:

· A press release announcing that the customer has adopted your product. This shows that your product has momentum. It might also show that you’re gaining ground on competitors.

· A customer success story that you can use early in the sales cycle to demonstrate that customers achieve measurable value from your products.

· An implementation story that helps customers evaluating different vendors see how well you partner with customers to meet their specific requirements.

· An article for your company magazine, online newsletter, or even a blog post.

· A video or pod cast of the customer endorsing your product.

· Quotes for use in datasheets.

· Abstracts of essential points for use in sales presentations.

· Abridged case studies that can be used to illustrate trends in white papers.

 

9. White Papers

Turn white papers into thought-leadership articles for placement in a trade magazine, company newsletter, ezine or even a short blog post with a link to the original. In some cases, you may have to cut the paper down slightly for length—white papers are typically 2,500-3,000 words, articles are usually 800-2,000 words. Often, you don’t even have to do that much.

10. Product Solution Guides

Repurpose product solution guides into industry solution guides or white papers. Many B2B companies understand that they need to talk about the customer challenges as they relate to the customer’s specific industry. Many solution sheets or vertical white papers combine new content that discusses problems of a specific industry and wrap it around existing product information to create industry-specific solution guides or white papers.  

11. Datasheets

Once you’ve written a datasheet that describes your key differentiators, how your product works, most important features, and three to five key benefits, it takes just a few minutes to crank out a page for your website describing your product.

12. Presentations

Many companies translate presentations into white papers and vice versa. I worked with one company that explicitly did this because the CTO didn’t want to have to travel so much in person and wanted to send a white paper in his place. In other cases, the white paper could be used as an offer for a lead generation or nurturing campaign.

13. Repurpose Print into Rich Media

And of course, since people absorb information in different ways and have different preferences as to how they wish to receive information, you present the same information in different formats. For example, excerpt a white paper into a podcast or video. Translate a video into an article, and so on.

How have you repurposed your content?

 

How to Use Case Studies to Drive Organizational Change

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?

From Presentation to Print: 3 Tips for a Seamless Translation

My 14-year-old daughter is obsessed with the “Twilight” series. She’s read all the books four times and seen the movies twice.  When she first saw the movie, she complained, “The movie wasn’t as good as the book. I like Edward (the character)—but I don’t like Robert Pattinson (the actor), he’s not Edward.”

My daughter is hardly the first to observe that when a book is made into a movie, something is often lost in the translation; conversely, sometimes the movie is better than the book.

The same is true when you repurpose a presentation into a case study or a white paper. As companies increasingly look to make the most of their content by repurposing it from one media to another—whether from Webinar to whitepaper to podcast to video—you must take into account the differences between presentations and print.   

Here are three areas to consider to make the transition successfully.

Do I know you? Making Introductions.

Before you can begin to think about how to structure your content, you have to consider your audience’s frame of reference when they see it. This frame of reference for a white paper is very different from that for a presentation.

Today’s IT buyers typically begin their quest for a solution with a web search. And often, one of the first pieces of content they’ll find as they perform this early research is a white paper or a case study. When they begin reading the white paper, they may know nothing about your company and product.

To get people interested in reading further, you need to begin with a discussion of who your solution addresses and what problem it solves. For example: The audience may be life sciences companies. The challenge may be how to market medical devices to physicians across the globe by providing rich content over the Web, while avoiding intermittent performance and availability problems that can frustrate users and impede sales.   

Now consider a presentation. Few people come to a presentation cold. Whether the presentation is given at a Webinar, a trade show, or as part of a sales call, the audience has typically been invited to attend.  The invitation is sent directly to a specific audience and is designed to entice people to attend by clearly stating the problem the presentation will address.  

Since the audience knows why they’re attending, a presentation typically begins with a slide or two about the company designed to give the presenter credibility before they get started. This information may include the number of customers, names of some of the more high-profile customers, number of global offices and so on.

Stating the Problem

In the last section, I noted that a white paper needs to start with a statement of the problem while a presentation typically starts with a few proof points about the company. At this point, the presentation will go on to reiterate the problem. In a presentation, this problem statement section is typically a slide or two with a few points from an analyst firm, such as Gartner or Aberdeen.

Since white-paper readers will have less background about the problem than those viewing a presentation, a white paper typically needs to be more careful about explaining the problem step-by-step.   

For example, I recently wrote a one white paper based on a presentation on gigabit passive optical networking (GPON) technology. The presentation included a couple of slides showing how telecommunications networks were increasingly being required to handle more bandwidth -intensive applications. While the white paper covered the same points, I did considerable research to make sure that I explained all the terms thoroughly, included more detail on exactly why more bandwidth was required, and overall made sure that I made all the connections between points very explicit.

Telling the Story

With a presentation, it’s up to the presenter to connect with the audience and to make the content interesting. Charm, personality, and an articulate speaking style go a long way toward engaging the audience. If a speaker fails to explain the connections between points, the audience can easily ask a question.

When translating a presentation to a white paper, the content and the writing must do all the heavy lifting. The piece must therefore include a compelling description of the challenge to draw people in and be well written, so that it’s easy to understand and answer the reader’s questions before they need to ask.   

For tips on creating a well written white paper, see (Well-Written) Content is King: 5 Tips for Evaluating Writing Quality.  

Repurposing a presentation is a great way to get more value from your content, but as you do so, be sure to translate your content in a way that plays to the strengths of the media in which you present it.

 

Please share your tips for turning presentations into printed content.

How to Squeeze More ROI From Each Customer Success Story

Getting a customer to agree to and approve a case study is often a long and arduous process. In some cases, I’ve literally worked behind the scenes for a year or more before a customer would agree to an interview for a case study.

Technology companies go through this effort because case studies are incredibly valuable parts of the sales process, providing much needed proof points to potential customers about the value of their products.

What if you could squeeze even more ROI from each case study a customer agrees to pursue?  

I’ve lined up and written hundreds of case studies for dozens of technology companies for over a decade.  The case studies I’ve worked on are typically used early in the sales cycle as vendors attempt to create awareness for their products. They’re used for the following purposes:

· For “new deal” press releases that demonstrate that customers are buying the company’s product. This is helpful for companies with new products on the market where customers haven’t completed full implementations. These press releases also demonstrate momentum—that customers are adopting the product.

· As an offer for a lead-generation or lead-cultivation campaigns

· For placement on the company’s corporate Web site

· Or they’re used by the sales force to get in the door or as leave-behinds after the rep has visited a customer for the first time

Most case studies used in the awareness phase of the IT buying cycle tend to be one to two pagers used to show what product can do and that customers just like the prospect are actually using the product. At this point, potential customers are in the process of creating a list of options they need to explore further and use the case study to determine whether the product should be on that list.  

This type of case study will typically discuss:

· The customer’s challenge that caused them to consider a new IT solution

· Why they chose the vendor

· A brief description the solution

· The benefits the customer has achieved from using the solution. 

But software vendors who only create these early stage case studies are missing an opportunity to take advantage of the same customer story to create content that can also be used later in the sales cycle.

Once IT buyers have created their list of viable options, they next want to look at each option in more depth. As technology products increasingly become seen as commodities, potential customers want to see which  vendors distinguish themselves as a trusted partner who can properly implement their solution and ensure that it solves the customers’ actual problems.

To address customers’ concerns at this stage of the buying process, why not create a more in-depth case study from the same customer interview where you can go into more detail about the implementation and adoption processes. Such a case study could talk about any unique:

· Requirements that needed to be addressed to solve the customer’s particular business problem and how you met those requirements

· Challenges you faced in implementing the solution and how you applied your expertise to overcoming them.

· Training needs and how you dealt with them

One vendor I’ve worked with that does produce this type of case study specializes in electronic medical records software. Customers in this market tend to be highly skeptical at all stages in the buying process so this vendor creates very detailed case studies that address these later stage buying issues by including detailed information about how its services organization helps customers:

· Customize the solution for the needs of their specialty and their practice

· Convert their paper medical records to an electronic format

· Trains technical users at the practice

· Train physicians and help practice managers encourage physicians to actually use the product on a daily basis.

By producing several case studies from a single interview, you dramatically increase your ROI from customer success stories by addressing different sets of customer concerns that come up in different stages of the buying cycle. Such stories can see you through the lead-generation process. They can be used as content in lead-nurturing campaigns, where you wish to reinforce the same message in different ways through different touches. And the sales force can use them when they engage with the customer.

How have you used case studies at different stages in the IT buying process?