Case Study Outline

Tips from Stories that Sell

Here are four ways to make your success stories more seductive:
1- Feature Only Insanely Smitten Customers
Who eloquently sings your praises? Who already refers you to others? Get those customers on record.
Take the time to pre-qualify customers

2- Capture Passionate Customer Quotes
To get passionate quotes from customers, ask questions that get them talking and sharing their emotions:
- “Describe the situation before and the pains/problems/challenges of that.”
- “Describe how your workday (or whatever) has changed for the better with the new solution.”
- “Can you share an example or anecdote of a time when the solution [insert name] made a difference for you?”

DON’T: Write quotes for customers.
Customers say infinitely more interesting things than what you might manufacture.

3- Tap into Prospects’ Narcissism – Make it ‘About’ Them
If you’re dating, you’re told to keep the other person talking about themselves. The same goes for wooing potential customers.
We all like talking about, hearing about, and reading about ourselves or others like us.

4- Display your Feathers – Those Tantalizing Customer Results
Show customer results – specific and as measurable as possible.
How do you get strong results? Going back to tip #1, choose customers well, in this case those that have only the best results and can share them.
Then, ask before-and-after questions. How much time or money (or whatever) did this require before, and how about now? Present those numbers in ways that put customers at ease. If dollar figures are too revealing, use percentages or factors of (i.e. cut in half, tripled, etc.). Weave them into your headline, highlight them in customer quotes and include them in sidebar summaries.

Case Study Questions

From Make a Living Writing:
Ask questions.:

• Why did you start this company?
• What were you doing before this?
• How did you get into this industry?
• What is the problem you solve for customers?
• What does this product do that’s different or better than competitors’ products?
• How has the company evolved since you started it?
• What are the big issues in this industry, and what’s your opinion on them?
• What does the company plan to do next?

Learn the story of who the founder was, why this company was born, where it was headed, where he was coming from, and why it was successful.

Taxes and Deficits

From Hoisington Investment Management – Quarterly Review and Outlook, Fourth Quarter 2012 as quoted by John Mauldin in Outside the Box.

 ...the latest fiscal policy actions will serve to further restrain economic growth. We cannot tax ourselves into prosperity as FDR’s 1937 effort and numerous other historical cases demonstrate. We can, however, deficit spend ourselves into poverty. Consistent with the academic research, we could not find historical precedent for the proposition that prolonged deficit spending achieved prosperity.
...
Still valid is the thinking of classical economists like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill: prosperity derives from the hard work, creativity and ingenuity of a country’s people, not by the federal government spending funds that it does not have. However, by diverting dollars from highly productive individuals and businesses through borrowing or taxes, government policy can spend a country into poverty. Transferring assets from income and wealth generators to consumption, unproductive or even counterproductive uses, however, produces failure.