Stop Asking Your Clients for Testimonials

Instead, ask them if they will be a best practice case study.

By Alan Alper and Bob Buday

At the heart of thought leadership is a novel way of solving a complex problem. But if your solution is only incrementally different than others, well-read executives will not be impressed. And it’s safe to assume they are well read. On average, 54% of the nearly 3,500 executives surveyed by Edelman and LinkedIn last December spend more than an hour a week reading research reports, white papers and other B2B thought leadership content. In our 2022 survey, two thirds of executives said such content was very or extremely important to addressing company problems.

Yet even if you have a unique solution to a complex problem, if you don’t have true stories of clients that solved it your way and generated outsized benefits, you won’t have enough. The money you spend to create and market your content won’t generate the return you hoped for. In our 2022 study, executives said real case stories showing a firm’s solution works is the most important facet of thought leadership content. 

This didn’t surprise us. Bob has been saying this since the late 1990s. You might convince a few companies to test a new but unproven idea. But they are likely to either be market leaders that can afford to be on the bleeding edge or market laggards, desperate to try anything. But between those two ends of the spectrum, most prospects don’t want to be guinea pigs for a new and unproven concept. 

So how do you get clients to let you tell their stories about the projects you worked on? We know how difficult it is, and we think we know why. Most companies ask clients for these stories in the form of a testimonial. But there is little value in that for your clients. Some even have blanket policies against publicly endorsing vendors.

We’ve seen a much better way: Stop asking clients for testimonials and start asking to feature them as best-practice case studies. Most executives and most companies want to be seen as exemplary in some way. If you can do that and they deserve it, it will be hard for them to turn you down. Just as important: Tell them you will not mention that your firm helped. You need to make them the hero of the story, not your firm, if you want them to bless it. 

With these case studies on your website, you don’t need to take credit. With the stories in your “Client Success” section, your audience will presume you helped. 

When you do that, you will gain two things for the price of one:

• Compelling case studies to support your thought leadership content.
• Real examples of your firm’s work: for business developers’ sales presentations, PR professionals’ media outreach, investor relations people’s analyst briefings, and copy for your website’s “Client Success Stories.”

Your marketing and sales chiefs will especially like the second bullet point. They know client “proof points” and strong references can be key factors in clinching a deal. 

Historically, B2B companies gathered these stories separately. A thought leadership research chief asked a team member to interview companies with experience on the topic at hand, some of them clients. The case stories appear in a research report. Independently, a marketing or sales manager directed a writer to talk to a client and produce a few hundred words on the project. The customer success story here is a testimonial. 

But given how hard it is to get clients to do either one, we believe the time has come for there to be only one “ask”: the best-practice client case study.

Developing Best-Practice Client Stories

So exactly how do you get clients to agree to let you write best-practice case stories on them? You need to do four things well:

1. Convince the person in your company who manages the customer account why it would be good for them (the account manager’s career) and your company. One reason is that it will make their client (the project sponsor and project leader) and their company look good. Second, it will make your account manager look good; who wouldn’t want to point to such proof of their effectiveness?
2. Convince the client why the case study will be highly valuable to them and their company – and that you are not asking for a testimonial, of course. Arm your account manager with how to make this argument. Put it in writing so that their client knows what they’re signing up for, how such a best-practice case study will benefit them, that your firm’s name won’t be mentioned in the case study, and that they will have editorial control over what your firm writes. In other words, make it a benefit-rich and risk-free offer.
3. Collect the right data – only the information you need to make a compelling case story, nothing more and nothing less. Interview several client people if possible (3-5) to get a 360-view of things, and get them to be open about the problem they solved. Have them explain the keys to solving the problem and the beneficial impacts of the solution. Press them to quantify those benefits in monetary, quality, cycle time, customer or employee retention and other common metrics of improvement. If they hesitate, explain why stating these benefits is important: that it is the inarguable proof that their initiative was a success. For those who say they can’t make a hard correlation between the initiative and such metrics, ask them if the word “helped” will suffice. (“Our digital customer experience initiative helped reduce our customer turnover 80% and increase revenue 20%.”) 
4. Write to a structured story arc – a narrative structure that treats the case study as a best-practice story. Many writers can struggle to create cohesive case study narratives, and for good reasons: The stories are complex, and the input can lack coherency. Understanding the problem, how it was addressed, what worked, and the impact can be difficult for writers who were not part of these projects. Even talking with project managers about an initiative (while important) can create confusion. If these project managers were good writers, they wouldn’t be managing projects for a living. The structure we recommend goes like this: About the company (details relevant to the problem it addressed) > About its problem > About how it solved the problem (at a high level) > Financial and other impacts > Key implementation obstacles and how they were overcome > The importance of the initiative to the company’s future success. In this structure, use only the details necessary to make a compelling case story. A high-level story spare of convincing details will be seen as conceptual. Conversely, a client story with more detail than necessary will be a burden to read.

Best-Case Case Study Examples

Take it from us: If you don’t publish authentic case studies that reveal how clients benefitted from solving their problems your way, your thought leadership programs will struggle. You won’t have the evidence you need to reveal the real value of your firm’s expertise. Likewise, your firm’s marketing and sales content will lack proof of impact.

Few firms publish client case studies that achieve this objective. Here are two case studies that recently crossed our desks that we feel really hit the mark. (Note: Neither firm is a client.)

On24/Guardian Life

On24, a $16 million provider of webcasting services, recently posted a well-turned case study that chronicles how a client (Guardian Life, a $13 billion revenue life insurance carrier) benefited from well-produced webinars. It nicely calls out key outcomes – substantial costs savings, revenue gains, etc. – from better client engagement and partner enablement (see below).  

Importantly, the case study details Guardian Life’s business challenges (primarily, the need to interact with clients during the COVID-19 lock-down) and the remedy (creating compelling, customizable and scalable events). This case study is clearly and concisely written, and in a way that makes Guardian the hero – not On24.