How to write case studies that attract leads and generate sales

“Success stories”. They’re a staple of PR and marketing.  But most of them are useless. Case studies that resonate with your best prospects and drive the most qualified leads contain key ingredients.  Omit any of them, and it’s recipe for failure.

Most case studies, no matter how well written, fall short.  They don’t contain the content–the specifics–that prospective customers require to take the next step toward giving you the order.

The right ingredients inspire the right response from the right people.  How do we know? We did the research and wrote the book.

The ingredients: a quantified benefit, the adoption costs, and pricing.  To turn suspects into prospects and prospects into customers, you must justify the price of your offerings in terms most relevant to the real needs of the people you’re talking to.  

NET Value: How to Profit As the Digital Culture Changes Your Value Proposition reveals for the first time what the most successful marketers do to make their case studies incredibly powerful tools for marketing, selling and boosting revenue. And the simple and often overlooked things they all have in common.  Things that drive more qualified leads to their web sites and  generate sales.

Read most of the stuff on corporate web sites that passes for success stories and you come away thinking that the writer’s main objective was to get the approval of the customer.  Sorry, but the main objective of a case study is to attract the right readers and nudge them toward a sale.

B2B cold calls epitomize the gap between sellers and buyers

When you think about it, it’s pretty obvious.  Seven out of ten B2B customers say they need to understand a vendor’s value proposition before making a purchase.  Which, to those customers, means one thing: they want justification for the price they’re being asked to pay.  Seven out of ten.  In electoral politics, this is a mandate.  Know how many vendors convey this kind of a value prop today?   Nine percent.

We’ve done the research. It’s all here in our book.  And it’s not anecdotal.  We plowed through hundreds of commercial web sites across a number of industries and questioned hundreds of customers.   Another way of looking at it:  only one out of ten vendors is imparting the knowledge wanted most by seven out of ten customers. Seems like a few opportunities are being missed here, doesn’t it?

Problem is, when a buyer starts asking questions, a vendor reflexively starts reciting from the company hymnal.  The buyer wants to hear about a benefit and gets a lecture on features.  Buyer wants to know what the product’s going to do for him/her and how hard (or easy) the process will be to get there.  Vendor keeps repeating variations on the “better, cheaper, faster” mantra.  In other words, the buyer and the seller are not only on different pages, they’re reading different books.  In different languages.  What we have here is a failure to communicate.

To us, it begins with the whole concept of what a value proposition is: simple math.  It’s the quantified value the buyer perceives in the product’s benefit minus the cost of adopting the product and the price paid.  The greater the positive difference, the stronger the “value” proposition.  It is a measurable quantity. And therein lies the problem. To a lot of vendors, their “value proposition” becomes an elevator pitch about the product’s competitive advantages and subjective superiority.  It’s qualitative.  And wholly inadequate.

So what does this have to do with cold-calling?  If you believe that your “value proposition” is simply the right combination of words and effective delivery of them, you’ll assume that interrupting someone with a plea to listen to you is as effective a means as any to start the selling process.  If, on the other hand, you understand your target well enough to know the relevance of your proposition to his perception of value you’ll know exactly how that target is best approached.  And it’s probably not a phone call out of the blue.

"Finish that brewskie and make a few more cold calls."

Amazon buys Zappos: If the shoe fits…

We were interested in last week’s news about Amazon’s purchase of online retailer Zappos.  In doing research for our book last year, NET Value, we learned that Zappos was not your garden-variety online retailer.  Instead, its model was pretty much what Amazon.com’s was, and is.  It wanted to be known as a service company that just happened to sell shoes, handbags, and everything else.  And like Amazon, Zappos realized that the “customer experience” should deliver everything a buyer wants.  Good fit for both companies.  Future value for customers, value now for shareholders.  Zappos understood, from its beginnings, the importance of the Net Promoter metric touted by Satmetrix.  It’s not enough to have satified customers.  What you want are customers who are loyal: the ones who’ll recommend you to their friends.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/22/amazon-buys-zappos/

Happy 30th, Walkman.

Book excerpt below from NET Value: How to Profit As the Digital Culture Changes Your Value Proposition by Steve Turner and Stan DeVaughn (2008):

“It was no secret that (Steve) Jobs had been spellbound for years by the offerings of Sony Corporation and the way the Japanese consumer electronics giant seemed to churn out one irresistible product after another.  (Stan) DeVaughn remembers him being particularly enthralled by the Sony Walkman, the iPod of its day, and as “whole” a product as technology (and the recording industry) would permit at the time.  Looking back, DeVaughn can only wonder what Jobs was thinking and planning as the chairman was furiously launching the Macintosh, surrounded by Apple employees with their Walkmans clipped to their belts and wired to headphones as they grooved to Men at Work or Talking Heads. “

Indeed.  The Walkman was the iPod of its day.  And, like the iPod, a “whole” product — everything you need is already there to begin enjoying the benefit you paid for.