I’m putting together some of the first case studies for my b2b sales company, and I’m wondering if there are any best practices on HOW to put them together? I’ve seen a lot of great case studies out there, but I’m not sure how they were created.
Questions in my mind:
Should I do 1:1 interviews, or send surveys to customers? Both I would assume?
What kind of questions should I ask? Any best practices?
How should I aggregate case studies? Would it make sense to aggregate customers with similar value props/use cases/feedback into a single case study? Or better to have case studies focus on just one customer?
Any frameworks people suggest following for putting these together?
Thanks for your help! First time doing this 
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I do see a bunch of product marketing managers/product marketing leaders in this forum, Hope someone can enlighten you, as for me it seems too complicated. All the best.
ooh I have so many thoughts on this! it depends a bit on what specifically you need your case studies to achieve and who they’re being written for. A couple tactical things that I suspect will be true no matter what:
1- 1:1 interviews, either video or questions-over-email if they are very busy. You should be going into the conversation ideally already knowing what story you think they could tell so you can help get the insight you need from them in the most compelling way. Of course, don’t be totally close-minded – sometimes people surprise you and have something even better to offer! - but in my experience you’ll have far better results with at least a few highly tailored questions. If you have CSMs or AMs who can help give you the low down in advance and frame the best questions, even better.
Surveys are also useful as a tool, but generally are more helpful for other types of content in my experience.
2- I highly recommend standalone case studies per customer, and then having tagging or other discovery architecture that allows your consumers of case studies (either reps who need to find and send them to customers, or customers themselves) to find all the ones that are relevant easily based on value prop/industry/whatever theme schema makes sense for your biz
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Happy to talk case studies in more detail @Carlos! I’d just have some more questions on your buyer and goals first.
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@Naomi Thanks for replying, this is super, super helpful! Sounds like 1:1 is the way to go, and that’s great to know. I wasn’t sure which path to really focus on, but it sounds like going deep and really digging into the customer’s story is better than what I can pull from Google Form surveys. We’re a SaaS parking technology service, and we sell our product to apartment buildings, condos and businesses that want to modernize how they manage/distribute their on-site parking, usually to tenants. So our customers are property managers, building owners, condo associations, or any business that has parking they need to manage (like, I just sold our product to a retirement home for managing employee parking).The big goal of this case study project is to refresh our case studies, and better demonstrate our value to potential customers who finding us organically, and those we reach out to in our sales process who then check out our web site (as well as to link to/attach case studies when doing cold outbound). The case studies currently on our web site are pretty old, and miss a lot of the value we’ve added to the product in the last year, and just completely ignore a lot of our newest types of ideal customers. I’m currently planning to reach out to 3-4 of our most successful new customers, and schedule some time to interview them 1:1. I’m thinking I’ll come prepared with a narrative, and a set of questions, and record it via zoom. Then combine that with data we can pull on our side (“They made $3k extra their first month!“) and put that into a case study. Feedback/thoughts very welcome.
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