Dan Martell - How To Create Case Studies for Your Business

00:00:00.080 What I want is they helped me go from here to there.

00:00:03.240 They helped me do this in half the time.

00:00:05.600 They got me this result in my business.

00:00:08.000 And there's a way using your questions

00:00:10.160 to get them to make those commitments.

00:00:24.760 Hey there, how you doing?

00:00:25.600 Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur, investor,

00:00:27.280 and creator of SaaS Academy.

00:00:28.440 In this episode, I'm gonna share with you

00:00:30.280 exactly how to create a powerful

00:00:33.020 and compelling customer case study.

00:00:35.800 And be sure to stay at the end

00:00:36.840 because I'm gonna tell you how to download

00:00:37.960 my specific framework for not only asking the questions,

00:00:42.300 but presenting the case studies on your website.

00:00:45.040 Most people are doing that wrong.

00:00:46.860 It's gonna be awesome if you have any concerns

00:00:49.440 of how to ask for the testimonial, how to create it,

00:00:52.380 all that stuff, we're gonna answer it in this episode,

00:00:54.620 but let's get into it.

00:00:55.800 So I have a philosophy when it comes to marketing in general,

00:00:59.300 but really just anytime you wanna tell people

00:01:01.680 how great your product is or services,

00:01:03.560 and this philosophy called show, don't tell.

00:01:06.720 I don't know about you, but when it comes to marketing,

00:01:08.860 a lot of people struggle with like,

00:01:10.240 I don't wanna come off as braggy

00:01:11.780 and I don't wanna be show-offy

00:01:13.320 and I don't wanna be that guy.

00:01:16.640 But the truth is, is that if people don't know

00:01:18.760 the kind of results you've gotten

00:01:20.400 for your existing clients or kind of the work you do,

00:01:23.040 then they won't know how to honestly assess you

00:01:25.720 versus your competitor.

00:01:26.840 And the truth is, is if your competitor's out there

00:01:28.820 and they're making these claims and they're delivering,

00:01:32.260 they're creating all these case studies and you're not,

00:01:34.900 then you're gonna be at a disadvantage.

00:01:36.360 So what I wanna share with you is my framework

00:01:39.960 that I've extracted from back in the day

00:01:42.040 when I was building my company Spheric

00:01:43.440 and I refused to do any case studies

00:01:45.780 because I prided myself on my customer's privacy

00:01:48.480 to slowly moving into documenting through blog posts,

00:01:52.680 the clients we're working with back then

00:01:54.220 working with Procter & Gamble,

00:01:55.460 Dole Foods, Johnson & Johnson,

00:01:56.760 but I still was a little hesitant.

00:01:58.380 Then I built a company, Flowtown,

00:02:00.900 and really in clarity, this other company I built

00:02:04.100 that was all about taking the experts

00:02:07.100 and putting them front and center

00:02:09.020 for everybody else to see,

00:02:10.260 and then letting my clients tell the story

00:02:13.340 of how we've impacted their lives.

00:02:15.420 To today, I have a company called SaaS Academy,

00:02:18.140 which is the number one SaaS coaching company in the world.

00:02:21.880 So if you're in the software business,

00:02:23.660 That's what we do.

00:02:24.660 And in that business, when it comes to case studies,

00:02:26.920 I literally have hundreds.

00:02:28.560 And we're talking like clients that we've helped grow

00:02:31.020 to over a hundred million in revenue,

00:02:32.760 raise over 400 million in funding,

00:02:34.940 like really big, massive results that if I just said it,

00:02:39.420 it wouldn't come off as the same,

00:02:40.840 as kind of like as valuable.

00:02:43.040 Whereas using the customer case study framework

00:02:45.740 I'm gonna teach you,

00:02:46.740 then all of a sudden it's them saying it.

00:02:48.840 And there's a very powerful way to do it,

00:02:51.480 to create a motion behind it.

00:02:52.920 So it's not just facts and data points

00:02:55.900 and characteristics of their experience.

00:02:57.700 It's really the results that other people just like them

00:03:00.660 are gonna be looking to achieve.

00:03:01.940 And that's why they're gonna choose to work with you.

00:03:04.040 But let's get into it.

00:03:05.200 Number one, more like them.

00:03:07.420 So the first strategy you need to understand

00:03:09.200 is who you decide to tap on the shoulder and say,

00:03:12.260 hey, I'd love to tell your story.

00:03:15.180 Would you mind doing a case study?

00:03:16.620 Or would you mind getting on a call

00:03:18.300 and just sharing your story and we could record it

00:03:19.980 and then produce something online?

00:03:21.760 because I'm really impressed with what you've done.

00:03:23.840 Now, choosing that, and I'm gonna give you the strategy,

00:03:26.780 number one is you wanna pick people

00:03:28.680 that are your best customers.

00:03:30.760 And the reason why is what you put out

00:03:34.120 is what you're gonna attract.

00:03:35.580 So if you want to attract other clients

00:03:38.560 that are great to work with,

00:03:41.320 that you can create a lot of value for,

00:03:42.960 that get incredible results working with you

00:03:45.020 or your product, then your best bet

00:03:47.080 is to approach those clients to ask them first.

00:03:50.300 because if you go and you just take everybody's case study,

00:03:53.620 then when I, as a potential new customer,

00:03:55.800 I look at like who you've worked with,

00:03:57.600 I might see big companies, small companies,

00:03:59.900 dentists, lawyers, and I'm like, eh,

00:04:02.320 they don't really seem like they're the right fit for me.

00:04:04.760 Whereas if you say, well, I only wanna work with companies

00:04:07.640 who are between two and five million in revenue

00:04:09.460 that are in this industry, and those are your case studies,

00:04:12.300 you will attract more of those clients.

00:04:14.620 It sounds simple, most people do not follow this rule.

00:04:18.760 And then they have this kind of like schizophrenic approach

00:04:22.200 to their case studies on their website.

00:04:23.780 And it makes it really hard to attract other people

00:04:26.260 that are your best customers.

00:04:27.500 So more like them.

00:04:29.100 Who are your best customers?

00:04:30.540 Ask those people for the case studies

00:04:32.380 because you will attract more like them.

00:04:34.300 Number two, focus on results.

00:04:36.140 So, I mean, if you've ever asked somebody

00:04:38.440 to like write a testimonial, write a blurb,

00:04:40.780 or you've like done a case study.

00:04:42.760 And I've done so many hosting events.

00:04:44.640 I always do them at the events.

00:04:45.880 And oftentimes there's no direction.

00:04:48.220 You're gonna get people that say, I really liked Dan

00:04:51.200 and working with him and his team is really great.

00:04:54.140 And they were very good to follow up or whatever it is.

00:05:00.060 It's all this like kind of characteristic aspect

00:05:02.820 of their interactions or it's like the details

00:05:05.840 of like what you offered them, okay?

00:05:08.480 Those are not things that are gonna move somebody

00:05:11.980 that's new, that's consuming this to decide to work with you.

00:05:16.040 What will drive somebody to go from skeptic

00:05:19.000 and full of objections and full of skepticism

00:05:24.540 is going to be results, numbers.

00:05:27.740 Where were they in their life

00:05:29.300 before they started working with you?

00:05:30.860 And what has the impact been?

00:05:33.660 And I know some of you guys are timid, okay?

00:05:36.240 Maybe you've got a technical background like myself

00:05:38.980 and you're worried you don't wanna come off

00:05:41.780 asking your clients for too much.

00:05:43.400 And you're like, what if they didn't get results?

00:05:45.980 I mean, there's ways to frame the outcomes

00:05:48.240 and the impact you've had on their business

00:05:50.120 so that they can talk to percent increases in total volume

00:05:54.140 or whatever it is for you,

00:05:55.640 but you need to focus on the numbers.

00:05:57.980 Do not focus on just the characteristics

00:06:00.080 because that will not produce a really powerful case study.

00:06:05.520 You'll just get a bunch of people saying,

00:06:07.680 I call these like, you know, fluffy testimonials.

00:06:10.760 It's like, I like them.

00:06:11.720 They're really nice.

00:06:12.800 I encourage you to work with them.

00:06:14.420 Yeah, that's not gonna fly.

00:06:15.860 What I want is they helped me go from here to there.

00:06:18.880 They helped me do this in half the time.

00:06:21.320 They got me this result in my business, okay?

00:06:24.100 And there's a way using your questions

00:06:26.300 to get them to make those commitments.

00:06:28.060 But if you're not getting results

00:06:29.680 as your case study collection process,

00:06:32.500 then you're just creating a bunch of information and noise.

00:06:35.500 It's not gonna get you the results that you're looking for.

00:06:37.480 Number three is seed the agreement, okay?

00:06:40.320 So here's the way I do it.

00:06:41.960 And you guys feel free to borrow this.

00:06:43.720 I call it R&D, rob and duplicate.

00:06:45.920 So you can R&D it for yourself

00:06:47.880 is when I start working with a new client,

00:06:50.300 I put it in the contract.

00:06:52.320 I put it in the agreement.

00:06:53.940 If I do these things, you agree to this,

00:06:57.520 which is to share your story of the results

00:07:01.060 that you've achieved working using our system

00:07:02.920 or whatever it is so that we can use that in our marketing

00:07:05.980 because we'd much rather be spending our time

00:07:08.280 working with you, getting your results

00:07:09.760 than doing a bunch of marketing.

00:07:11.060 And the best way to market for us

00:07:12.180 is to just tell our client's story, right?

00:07:14.920 And that's like, literally, that's one of our parts.

00:07:17.200 We have six core components of our growth flywheel.

00:07:20.240 And one of them is share our client's results.

00:07:23.000 That's why if you go on any of our social media

00:07:25.080 from Instagram to Facebook, to our newsletter,

00:07:28.220 to everywhere, from conversations with our scale specialists,

00:07:32.980 even within the program that we ask

00:07:37.440 and we collect the wins, we collect the case studies,

00:07:40.180 because to me, I wanna inspire.

00:07:43.000 I want to let a client that I start working with

00:07:46.940 know that, hey, there is a place in the future

00:07:49.140 where you're not only gonna succeed,

00:07:50.980 but we're gonna get to an opportunity

00:07:52.500 where you're gonna share that story

00:07:54.120 for other people to be inspired by.

00:07:56.520 And that's just part of the agreement.

00:07:58.020 So what's cool about it is that

00:07:59.100 if you let a new customer know

00:08:00.600 that you're gonna be collecting a case study in the future,

00:08:04.260 there's two things that happen.

00:08:05.300 One, they feel like, oh, this person's really confident

00:08:08.000 about the service they're about to deliver

00:08:09.400 or the product that they've created.

00:08:11.340 And number two is there's gonna be this like,

00:08:14.120 this effort to move forward to build something

00:08:17.640 and to get big results so they have a big story to share

00:08:21.100 because they know that's part of the agreement.

00:08:23.400 So it's kind of like an awesome like,

00:08:25.400 oh, this person is confident,

00:08:26.720 so that's great for your customer.

00:08:28.100 You know, you're confident delivering the service.

00:08:30.600 And then the other one is that they go out of their way

00:08:33.500 to put more time, energy behind the effort

00:08:36.580 they're giving you in your product,

00:08:38.420 in your service so that you have the best case study

00:08:41.320 for them to share with you.

00:08:43.400 And I think that's a really cool way.

00:08:44.740 So I call that seeding the agreement

00:08:45.940 in the early conversations

00:08:47.240 when you're signing the contract

00:08:48.300 or in your sales conversation, let them know,

00:08:50.660 hey, we're gonna do these things.

00:08:52.020 And when we do those things,

00:08:52.920 we're gonna ask you for this.

00:08:55.200 We're just saying we're asking.

00:08:56.420 And if you agree to that, you're okay to be asked.

00:08:58.340 You can say no.

00:08:59.460 Most people don't, but you can say no.

00:09:01.940 Then we've seeded it

00:09:03.280 and we've planted that opportunity for the future ask.

00:09:06.440 Number four, create an assembly line.

00:09:08.940 So the best way to create case studies

00:09:13.280 is not to do it ad hoc,

00:09:14.700 not do it like every once in a while,

00:09:16.520 you wait for a customer to say something nice

00:09:18.440 and then you say like, hey, do you mind if, you know,

00:09:20.740 we get on a Zoom call and we record it

00:09:22.760 or whatever, whatever, okay?

00:09:23.980 The best way to do it is to constantly build a process

00:09:27.220 to collect and produce and publish those case studies.

00:09:31.240 Let me tell you a story about my friend, Danny Inney.

00:09:33.280 Danny Inney's an online person.

00:09:35.520 He's, you know, he teaches people a lot of different stuff,

00:09:37.760 you know, online courses, et cetera.

00:09:39.260 And essentially they have a process

00:09:41.120 where they prompt their customers to share wins.

00:09:44.260 Now, when they get those customer wins shared with them,

00:09:47.540 they then go for the ask, right?

00:09:49.880 Cause they see it at the beginning, like I taught you.

00:09:51.960 And then from that ask, they have a whole SOP,

00:09:55.360 a standard operating procedure with videographers

00:09:58.800 in all the cities to hire them to go to the office

00:10:02.980 of that client or wherever they live

00:10:05.300 and to shoot a video testimonial.

00:10:07.840 Now, I know that might sound really expensive

00:10:10.300 and you couldn't afford to do this,

00:10:11.800 but take the, what they do out of the equation.

00:10:14.860 Just think of the assembly line.

00:10:16.480 So they literally sat down and said,

00:10:18.400 here's the process from A to Z for prompting, collecting,

00:10:23.300 you know, getting agreement from your client

00:10:25.240 all the way to then publishing it on this page, right?

00:10:28.440 And because of that, on a weekly basis,

00:10:30.480 they're publishing new testimonials

00:10:32.620 and they always put them at the top.

00:10:34.080 That way they're always new.

00:10:35.680 And as the sales and marketing team

00:10:38.100 are going about their work,

00:10:39.620 they can always reference back to that page.

00:10:41.280 And there's always new, fresh case studies

00:10:43.900 for potential prospects and buyers to look at,

00:10:46.420 to decide if it's the right fit for them.

00:10:48.900 And that's true for each one of their programs,

00:10:51.040 they have this SOP set up.

00:10:52.880 And I just think that is the way you wanna think about it.

00:10:55.760 It's how we do it at our company.

00:10:56.880 We have all these different,

00:10:58.420 what we call the escalation ladder of ways

00:11:01.000 that we can ask our customers from simple things

00:11:03.640 like a testimony all the way to a really high-end micro doc video case study. But we've got

00:11:10.680 different places where these case studies are published on a weekly basis. So they're always

00:11:15.260 replenishing. They're always staying fresh. And they're really allowing us to create a better

00:11:19.760 service to then have bigger impact for our clients to capture that in a case study to then tell that

00:11:24.560 and it just keeps getting better and better and better. And that's why we call it the flywheel

00:11:27.560 because it keeps growing as you invest in it.

00:11:31.100 Number five is put it on tape.

00:11:33.560 So some of you guys might wanna have it in an email.

00:11:35.920 It's an email, you screenshot it.

00:11:37.780 Maybe it's in your Facebook group, you screenshot it.

00:11:40.520 Those are all really low friction,

00:11:42.900 really easy things to do to capture these

00:11:44.900 customer case studies.

00:11:46.420 But to me, that's not really a case study.

00:11:48.100 If you wanna get the best, schedule a call on Zoom

00:11:51.420 and ask your clients specific questions

00:11:53.840 that get them to share the results,

00:11:55.820 gets them to share the context,

00:11:57.240 gets them to share their story of where were they

00:12:01.020 before they started working with you

00:12:02.460 and what were their concerns

00:12:04.860 and how did your process overcome that

00:12:08.460 or product help them resolve those concerns

00:12:10.480 and then what were the results,

00:12:12.420 the impact that they've received

00:12:14.780 using your product or service.

00:12:15.960 And I think that is the opportunity

00:12:18.400 to capture that on video, put it on tape,

00:12:21.060 use Zoom at the minimum.

00:12:22.500 If you can do it in person, always recommended

00:12:25.040 and then edit it in a way that it's short, tight,

00:12:27.940 and focused on getting an emotional connection

00:12:31.340 from the potential buyer,

00:12:32.520 seeing this case study of somebody just like them

00:12:35.800 getting a result from your product or service.

00:12:38.080 And that is the way to do it.

00:12:41.040 And I just think, you know, doing the video,

00:12:43.520 even if you feel super uncomfortable, and I get it,

00:12:45.840 it's like, oh, I can't even ask,

00:12:48.340 let alone like, now I gotta ask them the questions.

00:12:50.500 The good part is I'm gonna tell you exactly the questions

00:12:53.060 in a second to be asking them.

00:12:54.640 But my recommendation is you do it on video.

00:12:58.860 Then from the video, you can transcribe it into a blog post.

00:13:01.280 You can use it for an email newsletter.

00:13:02.840 You can use it for social media clips.

00:13:04.740 But most importantly, you can edit it down

00:13:06.800 into this tight, you know, 90-second micro-doc

00:13:09.860 of a customer case study

00:13:11.240 that's really gonna get people over the hump,

00:13:13.460 deal with their objections, and get them to buy.

00:13:15.380 So quick recap, five strategies

00:13:17.100 to produce highly compelling customer case studies.

00:13:19.840 One, more like them.

00:13:21.220 Pick your best customers.

00:13:22.520 Two, focus on results.

00:13:24.400 Three, seed the agreement.

00:13:26.420 Number four, create an assembly line.

00:13:28.760 And five, put it on tape.

00:13:32.060 Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,

00:13:33.860 I wanna share with you an exclusive resource.

00:13:35.620 You can click the link below to download it.

00:13:37.840 It is the Customer Case Study Creator.

00:13:40.080 Not only do I have the strategy

00:13:43.020 for how to identify and collect

00:13:45.000 and kind of manage the recruiting process

00:13:47.000 for your case studies,

00:13:47.800 I even have the blueprint for how to take the video

00:13:51.780 and put the copy around the video on your website

00:13:54.560 the right way so that you don't mess it up

00:13:56.540 because a lot of people don't do it right.

00:13:58.760 And then I also have the exact questions.

00:14:01.120 There's four steps to producing

00:14:03.080 an emotionally compelling customer case studies

00:14:05.780 with the questions and the scripts

00:14:07.680 for extracting the results and the impact

00:14:10.620 and the emotion that you're gonna need

00:14:11.920 to produce something amazing.

00:14:14.100 So if you liked this video,

00:14:15.400 be sure to subscribe to my channel,

00:14:17.180 click the like button and leave a comment.

00:14:18.980 Let me know what was the biggest takeaway for you

00:14:21.200 And as for usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger life

00:14:24.160 and a bigger business, and I'll see you next Monday.

Dan Martell - February 07, 2022

How To Create Case Studies for Your Business

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