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.

Getting a job at Google. Leaving a job at Google.

Silicon Alley Insider is obsessed with the so-called exodus of brains at Google, as though the mere thought of leaving the Googleplex is, ipso-facto, is unthinkable.  What’s the big deal, I ask?

People, especially in The Valley, have been departing really, really great jobs at great companies for a generation.  H-P, Fairchild, Intel, Apple, which long before Steve Jobs was a cult hero, employed defectors from H-P, Fairchild and Intel. And Cooper Laboratories and National Semi and Procter&Gamble and lots of other places.  Intel spun out of Fairchild.  Dozens of upstarts were begat by Intel.  So it goes.  A lot of folks have made tons of money at Google and devoted years of their young lives there.  They now leaving for the same reason they were attracted: because they were brilliantly talented, ambitious and inclined toward uncharted waters.  How do you think all those aforementioned companies got started in the first place? It’s the natural order of things.