A lot of practice and research is the key to writing a good customer case! The operation of the map is like the operation of this article. Saasope

Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public number “The operation of the map” (ID: saasope), author Yuan Lintu.

01

Foreword

In the field of enterprise services, the essence of doing the market lies in telling a story – a vision that can ultimately be achieved by a complete set of product solutions, and a small improvement in the function of a product.

Customer stories are extremely important evidence for the story.

It tells the world how important your product or service is and how perfect it is. Demonstrate how products and services meet customer needs and help customers achieve their goals. With the value of products, soft texts, etc., the marketing effect is better. The customer case is important for small customers’ self-marketing self-service and big customer pitch deck.

02

ToB Why Customer Cases Needed

Before you start preparing your customer case, you must first identify a problem:

  • Who is your target customer?

Whether it is a vertical enterprise service product or a general-purpose one, it is necessary to clarify the customer’s industry, scale, and stage. This can answer who the customer case is for.

The goal of the customer case is that when the target customer sees the content, it will feel like this:

  • Your product or service matches the target user;

  • You know the pain points of your target users;

  • You know how to fix it;

When the target user reads the customer case, they must be able to get this information and think the product is useful.

03

Classification/Value/Purpose/Application Scenario/Basic Ideas

Customer cases act on the entire user lifecycle, but as you know: users of different lifecycles have different content requirements. For example, if you can’t show the help center to the pre-sales user, he will be confused.

The customer case is mainly used in three phases: the “cognition” phase, the “consideration”/”selection” phase and the “getting started”/”use” phase.

The customer case can therefore be divided into three types:

[Cognitive]: Customers may not be aware of their own problems during the product cognition phase, not to mention the product/solution. Therefore, the content requirements at this stage are mainly in the form of stories and dry goods.

So [cognitive] customer cases are more user stories, and the keywords that users care about will not include products and brands, but only industries, scenarios, roles, etc. [Cognitive] The customer case is far-sighted and readable. Preference tends to describe how to solve a problem. such as “how to transform traditional enterprises”, “how to build a growth system” and “how to land smart retail.” After reading the case, canlet the user realize that your product has made a difference in this area/scenario, even if it succeeds.

[Consider type]: When customers enter the stage of consideration and selection, they have already had a deep understanding of their own problems and are actively thinking about solutions. At this stage, users are likely to have heard of your product and even have an awareness of your product. So, at this stage, allow users to understand your product in depth.

So [considered] customer cases tend to match user scenarios with product solutions to highlight product value. To achieve the user scene and product fit, the content should also have depth, express the language that is easy for users to accept, and highlight what the product does for the customer. Such as “xxx three major values ​​for users”.

[Getting Started]: When the user has completed the contract and enters the after-sales phase, the customer case is equally important. In the early stages of signing up and in the deep use of the after-sales phase, users will repeatedly ask the same question: “Do you have any other customer cases for us to refer to“. At this stage of the customer case, I prefer to call it best practice – operability, more emphasis on real-world scenarios and applications.

04

Basic steps for customer stories

The boss will always ask you to write N customer stories every month, and never mention the reason and purpose of doing so. If you do stupidly, then congratulations, either the quality is not qualified, or the quantity is not enough, this job is impossible to complete.

The previous section clarifies the value of customer storiesNothing to improve customer awareness / promote conversion / assist in getting started. Understand the current stage of the product and plan the content as a precondition for the customer case.

  • [Cognitive] Customer case assisted content marketing to increase the number of leads;

  • [Consider] Customer case empowers sales while facilitating conversion to a single order;

  • [Getting Started] The customer case enhances user activity and allows users to use it to increase the renewal rate.

Based on your content matrix, determine how many customer cases are needed and what type of customer case is required, which is a prerequisite for producing customer cases.

The second step is to create customer case pipelines and use sales, CSM to connect with customers. Each company has different processes and systems for customer management and management. The only owner of the customer is different. It may be sales or CSM. It cannot be generalized here.

It doesn’t matter who connects with the customer. It’s important to find the best customer case material. In addition to the various attributes of the customer, the most important are the three dimensions – “customer usage”, “industry influence” and “customer fit”, which are graphically represented as follows (prototype area size represents customer “industry” Influence”):

Actual Guide: How to write ToB

Customer usage and industry influence need not be said, can pass Research, product usage data analysis, CSM/sales communication is obtained. Here I especially emphasize the degree of cooperation. The customer case is required to be highly coordinated by the customer. These cooperation include:

  • Complete the interview/communication

  • Provide scenarios and screenshots for product use

  • Confirm customer case content

  • Provide testimony/photo/logo, etc.

There may be problems in any aspect, delays in the interview time, the case content is always unrecognizable, and even the deletion is required after the release.

So, customer engagement is very important!

After finding out which customer you want to do, the production of the customer case becomesSimple, the steps include:

  • Collection of background information: A good understanding of customer information can be used to find highlights in the customer case, as the subject of the article, including but not limited to: third-party reporting/sales, CSM feedback/customer data monitoring, etc. ;

  • Visit and communicate with your theme;

  • Case production, customer case production has a lot of skills, can be written separately, not introduced here;

  • Authorization;

  • Propagation and reuse. The reuse here is not only the reuse of the output, but also the material reuse. Product reuse refers to a customer case, which may be made in various forms such as PPT/EDM/WeChat tweet/long map to match different propagation routes. The material reuse refers to the entire customer case production process, which will accumulate a large amount of material and is useless. Useless does not mean useless, pay attention to the accumulation of materials, and apply to other aspects of marketing. For example, in this customer case, the service process is a bright spot, and a lot of material has been accumulated. Afterwards, a separate description about the service, the page and the like can be produced.

05

Customer Case Creation Skills

Internal material collection before visit

If you are lucky, your company’s sales relationship is doing very well, and the sales/CSM is very familiar with the after-sales scenario, then you can collect customer case information through a PPT template. Here, I provide a simple material collection template for your reference. The information you need to collect may have these:

Actual Guide: How to write ToB Actual Guide: ToB Operation Guide: How to write ToB Actual Guide: How to write ToB Actual Guide: ToB Actual Guide: ToB Actual Guide: ToB Actual Guide: ToB Operation Guide: How to write ToB Practical Guide: ToB

Notes on customer visits< /address>

CustomerDuring the visit, there are many methods and techniques. This has been written by others. I only say a few things that I am impressed with:

  1. Especially for general-purpose SaaS products, customers have diverse business models and complex business scenarios. Therefore, before visiting, we must seize the time to collect all aspects of customer product usage, trying to understand the business scene behind the customer. Collect as much industry information as possible, experience, communicate, and understand.

  2. There is a progressive and coherent relationship between the syllabus and the continuation. It is possible to find a deep perspective.

  3. Writing in the industry case, you need to ask some industry-wide, versatile questions. In order to prepare the customer case, we will refer to it when we are in the stage of high-level development.

Make customer stories easy to read

Your content may be high-profile, interesting, and informative, but no one likes to read large sections of text. Be sure to learn to make good use of content formatting elements to enhance the readability of content. Content format elements include:

  • Header and Footer

  • Image

  • Number or number of icons

  • Bold and Italic text

In addition to providing excellent SEO values ​​for case study pages, these format elements will help users quickly find key information in the case and make a good impression of what your business can do for them.

Familiar with numbers

In some cases, it’s mentioned that the product “increased traffic” for the customer. At this time, the reader will have questions: Does this mean that they have visited 20,000 visits from 100 visits to 200 visits or 10,000 visits? Numbers can make customer stories more convincing. However, the vague expressions of “doubling”, “upgrading”, etc., do not work. If possible, try to use real data, even if it is published by some companies.

Actual Guide: How to write ToB

Of course, not everyone is familiar with these charts, so be sure to emphasize what they should be aware of.

Actual Guide: How to write ToB

Readers can see where the customer starts and what the customer ultimately gets. Customers You can see the real results. Adding pictures helps readers understand exactly what you might do for them, making case studies more persuasive.

There are some small tips

  • When you take over a very good customer, you will have a lot of material, scenes, stories, background information, and more. What you need to do at this time is to remember your main purpose. These articles and content can be absorbed, but you must forget when you write. Don’t be greedy.

  • In the opposite case, if you encounter a case with few special materials and no material, you should also remember what you want, and then interpret and even create from limited material.

  • Customer cases should be simple, irrelevant content should be removed, don’t be greedy, focus on the key points of the customer case. If you have a lot of perspectives to write, you can write a few more articles, and it is good to make a series of customer cases.

Bailian into steel, a lot of practice and research is the key to writing a good customer case!

Look over

The first batch of CEOs of the E-Club Venture Club recruited, relying on media insight, influence and industrial resources to connect the resources and contacts of value-based venture capital to accelerate the creation of entrepreneurship. Insight into the core needs to carefully polish the five major interests, help you on the road to entrepreneurship!

Actual Guide: How to write ToB