#announcements

is this for a public facing initiative or a customer meetup that stays internal?

Ideally public facing.

I’m going to assume you don’t have access to their success metrics in this case.

Some things to consider:

1. Make talking ROI normal long before the customer story. AM/CSMs should be accountable for asking about goals/what a win will look like during onboarding and then documenting/centralizing that info and revisiting it in every touchpoint.
2. When you ask a customer to participate, seed the specific metrics you’re after. Often, it’s not just discomfort: it’s that your point of contact genuinely doesn’t know what’s relevant to share.
3. If they’re hesitant, find out if it’s a case of “not known” or “not comfortable” because there’s a big difference in what you do next. “ Not known: This opens the door to talk them through how to find these numbers or get them from others internally. It gives you a chance to share a script for making the ask internally or get an intro to those other people who have them. You can also work on the math with them, eg. start with time and translate to money by doing some calculations together.

Not comfortable: This is when your options vary - from sharing samples of past stories with metrics to normalize it, to looking for proxies/averages they’re comfortable with, to helping them calculate comfortable approximates they can live with.

You might also encourage them by pointing out that their results are strong (some assume their numbers are just ok or poor and are afraid of embarrassment) relative to the average or even just good.

While some people assume anonymity is the death of a case study, I strongly disagree: in many spaces this is the expectation, not the exception, and anonymity can make those customers comfortable going much deeper and more specific than were they named. It’s not a bad path to go if you’re hitting a hard no.

Depending on your solution, some other things you can do:

1. Bring the metrics to them. Grammarly and Loom are both great examples of this as they send newsletters with performance metrics. Other tools and services share performance metrics in dashboards or in-app.
2. I can’t stress enough how much of a culture thing this is. Companies that struggle for metrics often have hands-off or arms-length cultures where talking about ROI with customers isn’t normal or intentional and so they struggle. If this is a trend, dig into why customers aren’t reminded of/made aware of their goals from the start.
3. Asking questions surrounding examples and stories can be a really great path to getting tangible outcomes that aren’t metrics-based and can make the story stronger.