Episode 134: How To Use Case Studies As A Secret Weapon For Your Team

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Who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales Teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Well, certainly where I am, the weather is getting warmer, which means moods are improving and people are getting out and out more and more. And one thing that has landed with me as I start to spend more time socializing, more time with friends, more time with family, even more time out of my office, is that the power of storytelling has certainly not diminished at all over those long, cold winter months. And of course, who would expect that it would have because storytelling has been around for hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of years. As such a powerful way to engage people and sales teams, we are often in the business of engaging people, but I think over recent months and perhaps the last year or two, there's been a lot of movement towards clearly AI support, automation and trying to find ways to be more effective with our time. Unfortunately, what I've seen across that period, and certainly leaders that I work with have also seen, is that the ability to tell great stories, or perhaps the engagement or the motivation to tell great stories has started to wane a little bit from teams. They're leaning more and more into using AI to generate their content rather than thinking about that beautiful power of their mind to create stories and engage with customers. So at the moment, I'm seeing a little bit of a shortfall from sales people, sales leaders and sales teams in general, and being able to deliver really, really impactful sales. And I don't think that's a case of people not knowing how to tell a story. I don't think it's a case of people not being willing and prepared to tell stories, but I think it's a case of people having in some ways forgotten the art of telling great stories. So teams, we've been working with, and there's been a number of these over recent months have really started to lean in around how we can build out great storytelling for those teams. Again, often with these teams we're starting to see people have those first signs of fear, a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of trepidation around, oh no, I need to start learning how to tell stories again. But when we find a framework or a method that helps them build out those stories quickly, I'm also seeing that trepidation really quickly disappear. So for teams we're working with and in fact, today's podcast topic is going to be all about how we can help teams tell great stories and why it's a little bit different to what you might expect is that there's a terrific age old way of storytelling that I want to rekindle in the minds of everyone listening, particularly sales and business leaders. That is so easy to do, has such a big impact on teams and can be used for a lot more use cases than simply telling stories. And that is the power of case studies. So today's all going to be about how we create great case studies that also lean into storytelling for our team. So we're looking to kill two birds with one stone here. Building out great case studies for our marketing teams so we can use them in our social media content, in our brand building, in our marketing comms, any other way we'd like to do so. But also how we can use them in our sales communications, both in person with customers, but also as part of our follow up in our communications that we have with customers that are outside of those meetings. So let's get into it. By the end of this podcast, you should be really confident that you can get a repository or a database of 20 stories out for your team within a week. That's how quickly you should be able to do it if you follow the format from today. Okay, so let's start with why are case studies really important? There's really obvious reasons. They help customers see that others have trodden the paths ahead of them, right? That they're not on their own, that people have been willing to do what they're doing either in similar industries, in not so similar industries, but different use case scenarios or whatever it may be. They can realize and recognize that they are not out there and alone in using your product or your brand. They absolutely help to give customers confidence that the brand or that your products and services aren't going to let them down. But for me, really importantly, what case studies allow us to do is give our sales teams stories. They give them something to draw on when they're meeting with customers and talking about their scenario. They give them the opportunity to have confidence that when a situation comes up, they can think back to that great list of case studies built by the business to be able to draw on. And for me, this is actually the most impactful reason to build out case studies. They're great for marketing, they're great for everything else I've spoken about. But for me, where they are really impactful is where they can build confidence in sales teams to be able to tell stories. However, to build that confidence, we obviously need to have a central database of stories for them to hook into. And that, unfortunately is where we start to see sales teams fall down because it very rarely is a priority of teams. Often I find with teams that when we ask them to do case studies, it's yep, I'm in. I've got all the intent in the world to make it happen, but the actions very quickly fall down because they simply don't have time or don't know where to start. So the very first thing I'd like to go through today is a format that just works for case studies. In fact, it's a format that I use that can generate 20 case studies in less than an hour. That's right. Using this format, I can generate 20 case studies for any team in less than one hour. Right? Yes. They may not have the beautiful design completed within that time, but the content for those case studies completed ready to go for design in less than 60 minutes. So let's go through what that is. All right, first of all, as we're starting to think about the framework for building case studies, what I'd really like us to all consider is how our audience is going to engage with those case studies. Is it video? Is it written? Is it verbal, Is it going to side? Is it posters? You know, what is the format that's going to work for us? If in doubt, we default to written because it's something that we can use to build case study modalities out from later on. Right. We can build a video case study off a written one down the track. So we've picked our modality. It's a written case study. Really want you to start to think about how your customers are going to digest that. Right. For most people, we're viewing the average of at least one full length feature movie per day in content. Right. So we are time poor, we have short attention spans and we're not likely to read many things for very long. So case studies absolutely need to be short and punchy. And I recommend with teams onepage, it's easy, it's concise, and it gives teams a real focus on making sure they get to the point quickly. Sometimes I see teams go to two pages, but they intersperse diagrams or pictures or images. And certainly even on your one page, I'd expect to see two or three images in there. Right. But maximum two pages. Ideally we sit at one page. And I really encourage you to you to have your template four case studies set at one page. Right. In this instance, we know that we can get out to customers really quickly. They can read the case study. If it's going to generate questions, they'll come back to us. Right. If we have a good case study that a customer is interested in, they will ask us questions. So we don't need to cover everything in the case study. Just what's important now to do that, to get those case studies in a nice, easy to read and concise format, I recommend you focus around three areas only. Just three. Number one, the problem or the opportunity that your customer is trying to solve. I'll expand on that in a moment. Number two, what you did for that customer and number three, the impact that it had on that customer. Now we need to go through each of these because there are definite nuances within each that you can certainly get wrong and lead to very quickly developing a case study. That's not engaging, but I'll move through them nice and quickly as we always do. So number one, the opportunity or the problem. What we really want to be thinking about here is one, two or three opportunities or problems that our customer needed to solve. Were they trying to reduce operational costs? Did they need to speed up their delivery systems so that they weren't disappointing customers from what they were promised at a sale? Did they have too many leads that they weren't qualifying effectively, so closing numbers were low? Did they have a service that wasn't landing with their customer properly so they needed to find better ways to market it? Did they have certain expense lines in the business that were growing too rapidly and they needed to stop them by moving into newer technology? Did they have forklifts that were aging? Did they have vehicles that were breaking down too often? Whatever it may be, we want to think about what that opportunity or problem was. It normally comes in the form of a problem first and we try and flip that to an opportunity. So for a business that was delivering their product too slowly, the problem might be product delivery is too Slow, resulting in poor reviews. The opportunity, right, And I really encourage us to flick it to an opportunity wherever we can, is that our customer had the opportunity to improve their customer satisfaction ratings if they could deliver their product quicker. Now, the reason I like that better than being a problem is that often living in the forward, thinking in the positive, in the world, the aspirational world, can really drive engagement from people. Yes, problems do need to be fixed. And yes, you know, certainly the fear of missing out is something we use and we talk about in sales. But for me, focusing on what the opportunity, what their business could look like really does generate excitement in people when they're reading case studies. So number one problem, an ideally opportunity you were trying to solve. Number two, what you did about it. Right? And here, keeping these to two or three or even four bullet points keeps word count down and allows the document to be really easy to read. So we start to think about what we did for our customer, the type of machinery we implemented, the service we offered, the speed at which we did it. Right. The product that we created for them, the process that we designed. Right. The favorite for me, and I'll wrap this up in one case study in a moment, was the installation that we did for a manufacturing business. And the what we did for them was something very special and very unique that allowed them to take advantage of reducing their energy bills. So hold on, I'll run through this case study in a moment. But the second piece here, so we're following on from recognizing a problem and understanding what the opportunity is. So stating that opportunity for our customer, part two is we look at the outcomes that we provided. That is how we solved that opportunity, opportunity. And part three is we actually articulate those outcomes for our customer. Right. So part one, problem or opportunity? Part two, what we did to solve or take advantage of that opportunity. And part three is the outcome that we created. Now, the outcomes here, the more we can tie them back to business growth, happy people, happy customers, or those big ticket items within a business, the more impactful the case study will be. So in the instance of the opportunity being getting more satisfied customers and the solution that we rolled in was enabling them to deliver quicker, the outcome might be that we increased conversion rates from 20 to 24% through a more satisfied customer base or probably more impactfully here we increased return of business by 30%. Bogus number by 30% from being able to have more satisfied customers during their first delivery. We increased our length of customer lifecycle with us by being able to do deliver products quicker. Right. Whatever it may be, we want to really focus on the outcomes that we're delivering our customers, rather than just the features and benefits of our product. So if I was to tie that up into an example for customers, we've had projects with, one of my favorite all time customers that we work with, they were a wrap, a bread wrap producing business based out of northern Victoria. They had huge roof spaces, huge grounds around their property, but really big energy bills and they needed to get these down because it was impacting their ability to compete. At the same time, they also had quite socially conscious consumers who really did like to hear of the great positive impacts that brand made to the community and the world around it. Right. The opportunity was we allow them to compete better in a very competitive market. What we did for this customer, right, we put solar on their rooftops, but we also got really clever and managed to find some land around their site that was zoned as non buildable. But we were able to get some council permits through that allowed us to build a solar farm for this customer. So not only did they maximize their roof space, but they also were able to get a little bit clever and build some ground mount in the paddock next door to them. The result here is that we were able to install a significantly larger solar system that reduced their costs by a significantly greater amount. Right. And allowed them to be even more competitive in the marketplace. But what we also did was work with them to create some advertising that showed exactly what they were doing to their customers. And in fact, one of their brands became carbon neutral and they were able to advertise that on that brand in major supermarkets. So the outcome that we had here was ability to compete better in a very competitive market, I.e. sell more bread wraps. The second piece here was engage with their customers to increase the brand loyalty that they had with their customers. And the third piece here was by reducing their operational costs, they were able to invest in other areas, other equipment, which meant they could grow quicker. So this case study might have gone something like this. Our customer had the opportunity to become more competitive in their field if they could reduce operational costs. What we did was maximize their roof with solar, engage with local council to use some excess land around the site and deliver a solar system that was three times the size of what we could put onto their roof space alone. The outcomes for this customer are they became more competitive in their industry, they reduced operational costs which allowed them to invest in new machinery to grow quicker, and they were able to engage with their customers at a deeper level around a Carbon neutral brand. So bang, bang, bang. Three areas, Opportunity, what we did, and the outcomes that came from it. So when I say we can do 20 of these in 60 minutes, the way that I really encourage you to do this format is to simply interview your people in your sales team, your salespeople, your BDMs, and ask them to come prepared with three case studies. All they need to know is what they did, and you simply step them through that format. Have an Excel spreadsheet set up and you have those three formats and you record each one as you go. I've done this recently with one of my customers. I had four people on the call. We were able to get through four case studies in five minutes. Interviewed, written down, and away we go. So once we collect that data, that's the fast part, right? I'd expect you to be able to collect that data in about 20 minutes if you had your whole team around you and everyone came prepared with their case studies ready to go. Right? You do the numbers as to how many you need per team member. But where it got really impactful here is we took that case study, I threw it into ChatGPT. I'm using ChatGPT 5 and was able to create three different types of case studies from that information. A long form case study. So it took my dot points and created a one page long form case study, a short form case study that we could use when we wanted to have a really punchy story that we could tell our customers. And in fact, often it's the short form ones that our sales team will tend to learn from. And the last piece here is short form case studies for social media. Very short form case studies. So we're talking about 50 to 80 words. So by rolling them into ChatGPT, it simply produced three length case studies for me. I prompted it to consider it was creating for each one the three different prompts. Right. So for a long form, it was a one page case study, maximum 300 words, that focused around the opportunity, what we did, and the problem it solved using language that was professional but uplifting and ensure that we engage the audience into wanting to know more. Right. So we used some basic prompts and I'm happy to share those prompts. If you'd like, please get in touch. I'm more than happy to let you know what we use. However, the piece here that's really impactful is that we trained ChatGPT to be able to create those case studies from the content we had created. Really important. It was our content, our thought pattern. We Simply used AI to structure that into thoughts. From there, we can send them off to our design team. And by the way, that's about half of your time on case studies. Right. Is wrapping them all up, getting your format right, and just pasting them one by one into ChatGPT? Yes, no doubt. You could upload a file and get all of them done at once. I didn't do that. I wanted to go one by one so I could just adjust some nuances for each case study, but certainly that's about half the time. And then the result of this is I had 20 case studies, three versions of each, ready to go to the marketing team to design. Now, if we have a marketing team that's too busy, we can outsource that. There's lots of great programs, fiverr upwork. Right. Plenty out there. Can even try and get an AI tool to design them ourselves. Yes, there are tools out there. I'm not using them myself at the moment because I think that the human design templates are just a little bit sharper. But in the end, we're having 20 case studies ready to go, same format, and your marketing team should be able to just paste them in to a template that you use over and over again. So that's the broad format around how we go about case studies. The most important piece from today, I think, is the format of the case studies problem turned into an opportunity for our customer, what we did about it and the outcomes that came from it. But I think what's also really important is to think about how we can be training our teams to be using these case studies. And that's all about taking the 20 case studies in this example that you've created for them, getting them to memorize them, and being able to use them in front of customers. When they have digital versions, when they have hard copies, when they have these nice neat one pages that they can use, it becomes really easy for them to roll them out. With customers, storytelling becomes less problematic. There's more confidence for people in the team to be able to tell stories. And overall, everyone benefits because we have a whole lot of content that we can use with our broader business. So that's case studies to be used for storytelling. In a nutshell. I hope that format works for you. It absolutely works for most of the teams that we work with. If you'd like to know more about it, get in touch with me. You know where to find me. That's it for today. I hope everyone has a great week. Please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.

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