After years of working with organizations of all sizes—from tiny startups to gargantuan enterprises—we’ve seen many different efforts to create case studies at scale. 

Here’s one of the most important lessons we’ve learned: If you want your case study program to knock it out of the park every single time, treat your case studies like a team sport. 

When marketing tries to create case studies alone without sales, customer success, and leadership in their corner, the perspectives and needs of all of the other players get lost. It becomes much harder to surface, produce, and distribute customer success stories, especially at scale. 

And the end product suffers as a result. 

If you want to play in the big leagues, you need to empower your ENTIRE organization with a system to help everyone recognize, report, capture, and share wins. 

Because making case studies as a team is a whole different ballgame. 

Here are four reasons why you should involve not just marketing—but also sales, customer success, and other departments—in your case study program: 

1. Delivers more valuable stories for everyone
2. Builds a stronger story pipeline
3. Sells the program for you
4. Preserves customer trust

1. Delivers more valuable stories for everyone 

Every team at your company has a different perspective and different customer touchpoints. 

Maybe your sales manager spent 45 minutes chatting with your customer at a conference last week, while your CSMs have a monthly call scheduled with them and your CFO plays golf with his college roommate—who just happens to be your customer’s VP of sales. 

Ok, that level of contact is pretty unlikely, but you get the point: each group has different interactions with your customers, which means different insights to share.

That’s a good thing! It means that everyone working together can paint a more complete picture than marketing could possibly get alone. Working together to pool your insights means you’ll surface more and better candidates who align with your target prospects, get a “yes” from them sooner, and breeze through approvals faster. 

Everyone working together can paint a more complete picture than marketing can get by working alone

Having different perspectives can also make you more aware of the different pressures your prospects face and what their pain points are—if your product targets different personas (like CMOs and IT directors, to choose an example), having input from different teams can help you refine your messaging and gain fresh insights.

Different teams have different goals

Just like multiple teams bring different perspectives to the game, they also have different needs. 

• Formats: Marketing might want a 1,500 deep-dive for SEO purposes, while Sales wants a snappy side deck for prospects with short attention spans. 
• Success metrics: Different teams are measured by different success metrics, which can change the focus of your studies. CSMs might want case study metrics that highlight an exceptional customer experience, Sales might want to demonstrate ROI…
• Coverage gaps: Different teams may have different use cases, serve different geographic regions, and achieve different results…getting input from different teams means you can help every team gets the case studies they need to support their goals (and create case studies that they will actually use)! 

Bringing everyone together from the start allows you to address their specific needs and build case studies that deliver value for everyone. 

2. Builds a stronger story pipeline 

Working as a team to design and execute a game plan is the foundation of proactive storytelling.

Sales and CSM teams are closest to your customers. You need their support to surface stories and find the right candidates to participate. Without it, you won’t know who the happiest customers are, what coverage gaps they’re seeing, and what common objections they would like to address. Consequently, your story pipeline will dry up. 

Working with other teams helps build a robust case study pipeline, so that you regularly surface new story candidates as they achieve success with your product or service, organically.  

3. Sells the program for you

People are more likely to participate in a program they had a hand in designing, especially if they have a sense of ownership of both the process and the outcomes. 

People are more likely to participate in a program they had a hand in designing

On a more basic level, having more people involved also means that more people across the organization will be aware of your customer advocacy program—it won’t be a vague thing filed in the back of their minds as “marketing’s pet project.” 

The more people are on board, the more awareness at your organization of the existence and value of your program, and the more people are likely to promote it—both internally to their colleagues and externally to customers. 

Consider incentives 

Incentives can be a good way to nudge people into participating and keep your program top of mind, and it’s another opportunity to work together. Collect feedback on the types of incentives that would matter most to different teams (and clear expenses with leadership). 

Incentives don’t have to cost a bundle—they can be anything from public kudos in an internal newsletter to gift cards to cash bonuses. 

4. Preserves customer trust

We’ve talked a lot about the advantages of working as a team for your case study program. The truth is, it’s better for your customers, too. 

Imagine hearing from someone you’ve never met before, and they ask you to say nice things about them. 

Your first response will probably be something along the lines of “who the heck are you, and how did you get my number??”

For a customer, a random stranger in your marketing department asking them to participate in a case study can be just as jarring. As organizations tighten their IT security, emails from unknown sources can even get filtered to spam, making it even harder to make contact. 

If a trusted connection makes the ask and introductions, that first interaction is much more likely to go smoothly. 

Want to hit a home run?

The ball is in your court. Join forces with our all-star team of project managers, writers, and interviews to create case studies that your prospects will love. 

Contact us to learn more.