How do you ideate case study and other sales assistant content that isn’t necessarily “sales enablement”?

You want to spend time and resources on creating sales content that will actually be useful to the sale team, and here are two things you need to understand first

1. Have a really good understanding of your sales process, and have a map of what assets you have for each step of the process so you can understand where the gaps are
2. Understand what type of content is working best (for instance, what types of customer stories resonate the most with prospects) so you can double down on that

The best way is to simply ask your sales team what they want/need to be more successful - you can do surveys or get anecdotal input or if you use tools like Guru or Highspot then you can look at analytics for more data to inform your content planning.

In my experience customer testimonials and case studies are always the #1 most requested asset from sales. In a couple of my roles we ended up polling the sales teams on what their most requested item(s) might be from Product Marketing (because we were all bombarded with various requests!) This way we could stack rank them and focus on one or two key items based on the inputs. Furthermore this gave us a strong mechanism to take back to Sales when they demanded more items or ones not prioritised (i.e 'you told us that x and y are your key asks!") But it shouldn't just be about delivering on what they want and in an ideal world you would help quantify the value of any of these assets including case studies. i.e Did they help close deals? Is there any revenue attribution you can put against these assets? What is the ROI on case studies? etc. Outside of robust tooling that helps you with attribution this is often very difficult to track but putting some level of rigour into quantifying the value helps you align better with Sales and also provide insights in to the value of any given asset!

I love this question as customer advocacy is critical and should be part of a standard sales enablement program for priority launches and initiatives. There are many considerations for developing a case study or other sales enablement materials, namely the overall objective, target audience, and scope of content. Getting input and buy-in from sales will be critical, as they are a key partner and user of this content.

1. Objective: Define the goal for the content such as acquisition, upsell, or usage.

2. Target audience: Determine the geography (global or regional), segments (consumer, SMB, enterprise), industries, and persona(s) that would benefit most from the content and work with sales to identify a list of “friendly” customers to approach.

3. Scope of content: Identify the requirements for the case study and/or testimonial from key points to relevant metrics important to the customer. 

Here is an example:

Working at a B2B SaaS company focused on making teams more productive, the pandemic had hit, and remote work was the go-to theme. However, we were still learning what this meant across industries, representing a significant problem for our customers and prospects. With a large product portfolio centered around collaboration, it was important to showcase how customers were using our products and third-party integrations remotely.

In partnership with sales, we identified a target list of 'friendly' customers in the United States region, focusing on the enterprise segment within the higher education vertical. These customers were heavy users of our products with integrations covering multiple use cases. Sales provided valuable insights on which customers had compelling stories and were likely to participate.

Additionally, as the company was shifting from a Product-Led Growth (PLG) model to an enterprise focus, it was important to ensure we captured this segment. For the higher education vertical, we focused on the trainer-learner relationship and the staffing relationship. This helped us create content that was relevant and resonated with the specific needs of that industry.