A little about me
Hi, I'm Jehan, the showrunner here at Their Words. I take care of everything from biz dev to delivering final drafts. You can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
I've led product marketing and sales enablement for over 12 years, supporting B2B sales and marketing teams across Silicon Valley. And I've operated at every growth stage, from 50-person startups to enterprise sales machines like LinkedIn.
I faced a recurring challenge during that time as my team and I took products to market. In almost every instance, I heard our sellers say...
"We need more case studies across industries and use cases, and we need them yesterday."
When our sales team couldn't produce past examples of customer success, we failed to build confidence in our solution. Instead, our prospects began to think twice, ask more questions, and, more often than not, delay or abandon the buying decision.
You may have noticed the same dynamic with your potential buyers. When evaluating your product or service, your buyers are hunting for proof that you can help them succeed. They're eager to see you've helped others like them and how you've driven outcomes for their specific challenges.
But building a robust bank of case studies to influence buying decisions—stories that cover various challenges, goals, use cases, and industries—looks easier than it is.
I understand the challenges because I've seen teams struggle through them:
- Painful coordination: Someone must own the initiative and play one part creative copywriter and another part project manager. It's challenging, exhausting, and repetitive for anyone to keep up.
- High time cost: Just one case study takes 6-8 hours to deliver, from identifying customers to gaining approvals, scheduling and conducting interviews, and writing and designing the final asset.
- It's no one's full-time job: Despite their criticality for sales, case studies are likely 10% of someone's job. Without case studies and examples, sales teams often lack a key ingredient to close deals.
- Interviewing skills: It’s one thing to get a customer to say, “We like the product.” It’s another to capture tangible metrics, like revenue growth, cost savings, or efficiency gains, and meaningful narrative about your solution’s impact. Marketers need strong interviewing skills to pull out specific outcomes, anecdotes, and unique perspectives.
- Shortage of stories: Most B2B sales teams are left to fend with 5-10 usable case studies created 1-2 years ago. Not nearly enough, as markets, customers, and competitors constantly change. Plus, prospects want to see more than 1 or 2 examples of success for their use case and/or industry.
- Ineffective stories: Teams often struggle to create case studies that speak directly to customer needs and how your product is uniquely positioned to meet them. They also rarely go deep enough into the struggles faced by the clients and how your product made a tangible difference.
As your sellers struggle to build credibility and show examples of how you outshine the competition, your prospects choose to work with other vendors in your space.
I want to help make sure that doesn't happen.