Let your customers do your marketing: A practical guide to creating customer case studies and testimonials

It’s no secret that case studies and customer testimonials can be wildly effective at piquing top-of-funnel interest and converting new customers. After all, what could be more convincing than hearing about how life-changing your product or service is directly from an actual customer?

As a B2B-focused seed-stage investor and a former B2B product marketer at Stripe, Uber, and Twitter, I’ve spent quite a bit of time creating case studies and customer testimonials and helping portfolio companies do the same. I find that founders with limited marketing experience can sometimes be unsure about where to start and intimidated by creating case studies, so I wanted to share a bit about my production process. I also wanted to explain what I mean by the “menu of possible case studies,” ranging from low lift to in-depth effort.

This post will cover:

• When to use customer testimonials and case studies
• How to determine which customers to feature
• What information to include
• The menu of possible case studies
• How to build a culture around collecting user stories

When to use customer testimonials and case studies

Use customer testimonials whenever and wherever you can — but always when launching a new product, feature, or service. Testimonials are arguably the most powerful tool in your sales and marketing kit. They can be added to outbound sales emails, in sales collateral, on your website, in investor pitch decks, in a PR kit for media — the opportunities are endless.

At Stripe, we often gated launch announcements on finding at least three user testimonials to feature. This could be as simple as a quote we drafted for customer approval based on their feedback or as complex as writing up an in-depth case study, creating a testimonial video, or pitching a feature story and lining up media interviews with the customer.

Select customers that support your business and campaign goals

Figuring out which users to feature is the obvious first step in creating case studies and testimonials, but it’s not always as straightforward as it seems. You may not have the ideal customer or customers actively using your product. Or, the customer might be a recognizable brand, but only scratches the surface in using your product. Below are a few guidelines for how to choose wisely.

At Stripe, we always began with our campaign strategy, asking ourselves, “What are the key features we want to increase awareness of, the industries we want customers to know we operate in, and our differentiation vis-a-vis competitors?” We used the answers to these questions to guide testimonial selection. For example, for our big Connect re-launch campaign at Stripe, we wanted to highlight Connect’s international capabilities, our “Instant Payouts” feature, and the benefits Connect provides to the supply-side of a marketplace or platform specifically.

Based on our launch strategy, we brainstormed the ideal users to help us tell the story. This is useful in two ways: 1) Ideally, we already have those users, and it’s just a matter of reaching out and telling their story, but also 2) It can help focus the sales team on a “wish list” of customers to pursue pre-launch.

For our Connect launch, we found three customers who immediately fit our launch requirements. To communicate the specific themes we identified, we created in-depth video case studies with Kickstarter (international), Lyft (Instant Payouts), and Squarespace (supply-side benefits, focusing on the store owners). Fun fact: we filmed the Kickstarter video one day before the Squarespace video. There was a snowstorm in NYC on the day of the Kickstarter video (hence the snowball fight scene), and it was 60’s and sunny when we got to Squarespace the next day!

Sometimes, the ideal customer might not exist — at least not yet. When this happens, you can aim high and identify a “dream” customer. When we were writing the Product Charter for Stripe Billing, we identified Atlassian as the canonical example of a user with a complex SaaS billing structure that we wanted to be able to support and talk about, but they weren’t yet using Stripe for billing. It took a few years (and a lot of work on the sales side!), but we finally signed them and got the case study.

The most difficult balance to strike is finding referenceable, large customers that will bring in others, while ensuring the customers are using the product as deeply as we would like. At Stripe, we often did a mix of the two. We chose some bigger logos and worked with them closely to make sure they got the most out of the product, and some smaller logos that had killer use cases we wanted others to emulate.

What to include in a testimonial or case study

It may seem obvious, but it is crucial to paint a clear before-and-after picture when it comes to the content. Understand what the customer was doing before, what tools they were using, how many people were involved, and how many hours it took previously, and then contrast that to tangible improvements when using your product or service. The more specific the better! (i.e. in the Connect blog post, we highlighted that within a year of adding Instant Payouts, more than 50% of Lyft’s driver payouts leveraged this new feature, and we included driver quotes about the emotional impact receiving same-day pay had on their lives).

The menu of possible case studies and testimonials

Case studies can range from a one-sentence testimonial scribbled down in a sales call that the team gets permission to share only in private sales collateral, to a fully produced video like the ones linked above. Both can be useful.

Start small and check in with sales (or whoever regularly speaks with customers) to see how customer testimonials help them close deals. Based on the themes, values, and use cases you want to highlight, what do you already have that can be quickly packaged up and shared? This can be as simple as a statistic or one-liner to include in outbound emails, a slide in a sales deck, or on a landing page (see a few examples if you scroll down here), or as complex as a more in-depth written case study.

Tactically speaking, here’s how we brought two types of “case studies” to life at Stripe:

• Website/sales slide testimonial quote: Before launching a product, we (product marketing) would get on the phone with a beta customer and do a quick 20-minute call asking what they did before using the product, why they were interested in a new solution, what value they saw when trying out the product, how it changed their workflow or moved a critical metric. We positioned these calls as “product feedback” calls versus “testimonial” calls to assess if this person would give a good testimonial. Then, if they shared anything that helped us communicate the key value propositions, after the call we asked their permission to use their comments in internal sales collateral and on the website. We drafted a quote based on their comments and asked for their approval on the quote.
• Case study videos: These videos were more involved and took a few months from start to finish. We worked with a freelance documentary filmmaker, who came with her own production, filming, and editing crew. We drafted the initial interview questions, worked with sales to identify the best contacts at the company to interview live, drafted the narrative, and then worked with the filmmaker to bring that vision to life.

The customers enjoyed participating because we gave them lots of amazing b-roll of their office and employees that they used in recruiting and marketing videos (at no charge). We always tried to minimize their time as much as possible to make it easy for them to participate.

We used the content in every way possible. We cut the videos into shorter segments that the sales team used in pitches. We used the video snippets at events and conferences (like Money 20/20). We took the best quotes from the videos and turned them into sales collateral slides or paid media units to get as much mileage as possible from our (significant) time and budget investment.

How to build a culture around collecting user stories

It’s much easier to collect and create customer testimonials in an environment that focuses on regular user conversations, and has solid documentation practices internally. This is really challenging, and really critical. Getting everyone who speaks with customers in the mindset of looking for and capturing customer stories is worth the effort. Make gathering customer stories and quotes an everyday part of the business routine — and make it easy for everyone to record and share the customer content.

At Twitter, we featured a user of the week at all our weekly all hands meetings, and continuously solicited new examples of users to highlight internally. We featured user quotes on posters in every Twitter office around the world.

At Stripe, the marketing team created a simple Google Form for sales to capture customer comments and sent out periodic reminders asking the sales team to fill out the form. In less than 10 seconds, salespeople could add a quote or example they heard on a customer call. Their input populated a spreadsheet where we captured stories and examples by product, sector, and geo. Product marketing actively monitored the spreadsheet and followed up to learn more or create a case study when the example was interesting. Our founders John and Patrick constantly reminded us to engage our customers for feedback. In fact, Patrick did so in product reviews so frequently, that we joked about coming to our next launch review meeting wearing t-shirts that said “Have you talked to a user about this yet?”

New tools also make it easy to collect and review potential customer testimonials. You could browse Gong or Chorus transcripts to identify interesting examples to highlight. You can peruse shared Slack channels and quickly jot down ideas in a “case studies” Google Sheet to refer to later. Conducting calls during product beta periods also provides many insights and nuances about what features or capabilities customers are most excited about and where there is room for improvement.

If you’re at an early-stage B2B company, I hope you find these tips useful for starting to build your own stable of referenceable customers and case studies.

Once you start seeing how case studies and testimonials lead to shorter sales cycles and higher close rates, you will see what a strategic asset they are.

In summary, a few tips:

• Start with your campaign and launch goals when selecting customers to feature
• Create a culture of always-on user engagement
• Keep in mind the wide range of possible outputs for case studies, from simple quotes to in-depth videos

If you use any of these tips to create testimonials or case studies, please let me know what is working best!