3 Easy Strategies For Finding Business Case Study Participants
As your business grows, you need collateral to share how your customers and clients use and love your services or products. Case studies are a powerful sales and marketing tool that organizations should invest time and money in. However, finding case study participants in a sea of customers who use your products can be challenging. How do you determine the customers to go after first? Here are some ideas to help you find your first case study partners.
1) Find Clients Who Are Fans Of Your Brand
One of the easiest ways to find case study participants is starting with customers who are fans of your brand. There are a couple of strategies that your company can use to find these fans. Let’s dive into three ways that marketing can find brand fans.
Customers Who Rate Your Business Highly Using The Net Promoter Score
Does your company use Net Promoter Score to find customers who are detractors, passives, and promoters of your business? At the most basic level, Net Promoter Score is a quarterly survey that you send to all your customers. Customers rate your organization on a 0-10 scale. Customers who rate you 0-6 are detractors; 7-8 are passives, and 9-10 are promoters. The best case study participants are promoters.
Once you know who your company’s promoters are, you can easily reach out to those people to sit down for a case study. Not all promoters will feel comfortable chatting with you for a case study, so they may say no even if they love your brand. Send a quick email, though, because the worst they can say is no.
Customers Who Submit Reviews On Sites Like G2 Or Capterra
Next, you can also find fans by checking out who rates/reviews your company on sites like Capterra or G2. These customers have already put their thumbs on the scale by submitting a review with their name attached to it. First, dig into your customer CRM to see if you can find the exact details of their account. Then, reach out to them to see if you can further highlight their use case and story through a case study.
Customers Who Stand Out To Sales/Customer Success As Fans Of The Brand
Lastly, reach out to customer success and sales representatives to see if they know anyone who would make a great case study participant. Connect with the people-facing roles at your organization to see if they have a customer in mind for your case study project. You can also ask sales/customer success about any customer you are thinking about connecting with. They may know something about the client and their use of your product that you should know going into the call.
2) Find Clients In Up-And-Coming Industries
Next, case studies should also be forward-thinking. 💭🤔
As a marketer, you must understand business trends and act on them. One way to do this is by finding customers who belong to up-and-coming industries. Interview these clients today, get their case studies up on your website with some additional SEO thought work, and you might see people in that industry coming to you. If your sales team is good at outbound sales, they may be able to find other potential customers in this industry to share your case study with.
Make Sure The Industry Has Enough Contenders
In 2020, video conferencing software was an industry with many eyes on it. 👀
This software industry surged in 2020, but was there an actual increase in the number of players in the industry? Not really. Zoom took a large chunk of video conferencing sales. There were some other players like Google Hangouts, Skype, etc., but most of these weren’t new, just there.
If Zoom was a client, would a case study from them work in your favor? Possibly, they have a lot of prestige, and the other video conferencing tools might decide to join your company if they know that Zoom trusts you.
Going after video conferencing software because you think there are tons of deals wouldn’t be a smart move. Some of those deals might be large, but you would quickly run out of opportunities to create
Look into interesting trends lists like this one from Forbes. Do you have any clients in these industries already? If so, reach out to these companies for a case study interview.
3) Find Clients In Industries That Are Tough To Close
Last but not least, we have to use case studies to speed up the sales process. Case studies are a great way to reengage leads and let them know that your organization is perfect for them. It’s time to dig into the data to see which companies traditionally take forever to close.
Ask Sales Which Industries Are The Toughest To Close For Them
Before you dig into the data, try to get some anecdotal data. Talk to each of your sales representatives. What industries take forever to close? Are there any industries that are difficult to even get to demo? Get the dirt on all the customers your team can’t close. Having individual and overall team data will help you pick the best case studies to help your sales team close deals.
Look At The Overall Data
Dig into the overall data after you connect with individuals and get sales team thoughts. Numbers are objective. They can tell a completely different story from your sales team. Sales teams have subjective knowledge about the sales they find difficult or troublesome. Helping your sales team feel more confident with great sales enablement material is important, but so is looking at the numbers to see which opportunities are struggling to get across the finish line.
Look at leads that don’t turn into opportunities, look at leads that don’t get into demo, quote, etc., try to learn about the leads that ended up being closed lost. What about deals you won that strayed from your average time to close? When you collect that data, are there any industries, company sizes, products, deal sizes, etc., that stand out to you? If so, consider using that information to pick your next case study participant.
If you find that sales conversations align with the data you find, you should highlight these types of people as your first case study participants to find.
Conclusion: Finding Case Study Participants Does Not Have To Be Challenging
Are you ready to find case studies faster than ever before? Using the three strategies I’ve outlined today can help you do just that. When you leverage customer reviews, industry data, and sales insights, you are bound to find case studies that work for your brand. I’d love to know: what do you typically use to find case study participants?
P.S.: Do you need someone to take over your case study work? Consider hiring me as a case study writer. I can help you pick clients, interview them, and produce stellar case studies for you and your sales team. Not ready to hire a case study writer yet? Download my free eBook about case studies to learn more about producing company case studies.