#open-share

I have a couple case studies in the works (published one today!) from large companies.

What I've found to be most successful here is having the buy-in from the executive sponsor first. So I've been able to ship case studies pretty quickly because the VP/C-Suite person is already on board. They get to tell their story & provide a quote. End user might provide a bit more color/detail.

Yep!

1. Disambiguate the ask. A huge stumbling block here is how companies tend to ask in the first place. Attached a slide that might help.

2. Appeal to authority.
   It can help to tap your C-Suite/leadership to help make the ask/appeal to the customer, especially if they already have a connection/relationship to leadership on the other side.

3. Provide a shareable overview. A 'pitch packet' that is concise and covers the benefits of participating, what is involved (process) and strong examples can certainly help.

4. Use celebratory language. Customer feature, customer story, success story, customer spotlight, etc. vs. "Case study" (womp womp)

5. When all else fails, invite them to co-create content (webinar, presentation, etc.) instead and use that as an inroads to a story.

@Shannon Howard - Interesting, how do you get to the executive sponsor at the company to begin with?

@Joel Klettke’s point #2 above! I'm really fortunate that a number of our large customers are long-time customers with relationships with our founders. So they've made a lot of personal intros to executive sponsors. Our AEs also do a great job of building bridges with executive sponsors.

Thanks, super helpful! We have a unique model where we don't sell directly to the customer - we sell only through partners and a vendor marketplace, so we don't own our customer relationship at the outset nor do people at the customer's company beyond the end user necessarily know who we are.

Oh wow. Yeah, that's different, @Tim Jahn. Wonder if that's something could be accomplished through your partner success team? Or even contracts?

Thanks @Kaily Baskett super helpful!!

oh man yea doing anything through partners is herding cats - good luck @Tim Jahn

Is it a SaaS/web app at least? Can you hit the end users through Pendo or Intercom or some sort of support channel? Sometimes that's a good play to end-around the partner/channel to get direct access.

@Kim Plank knows a thing or two about capturing and creating customer stories at scale within a pure channel ecosystem.