In my story about ShowMojo’s case study program, I focused on how I helped the marketing team produce and distribute case studies.

But there’s a lot more to their program than just production and distribution.

So I asked Peter Schuh, founder of ShowMojo, to pull back the curtain on his success. We talked about:

• How his team got customers to agree to interviews
• What he did to “tune” his team to look for story candidates
• Why he didn’t prioritize chasing big logos for case studies
• The importance of building to “Case Study Critical Mass”

How ShowMojo Got Customers to Say Yes

When I asked Peter why he thought ShowMojo was so effective in securing customer interviews and case study approvals, he highlighted three things.

Building Affinity by Nailing the Support Game

Even with knockoff competitors crowding the space, Peter explained, “Our customers are our customers because they recognize the difference.”

Much of that “difference” boils down to support.

He continued, “We really do rather well on the support game. So the customers have a level of comfort with us because we are there to support them. I'm not going to say it's perfect, but it was quite solid.”

Establishing Relationships Through Onboarding and Beyond

A big part of nailing the support game is the process, especially onboarding and regular check-ins.

“One thing that really helped us is the onboarding process. Our customers get assigned an onboarder… sometimes that's a one-off appointment, but often there’s a follow-up and some email back and forth. So there's a little bit of a relationship,” Peter said.

Depending on the type of customer, the support team continued to build that relationship through either quarterly, semiannual, or annual account check-ins.

“Those regular account check-ins kept the conversations going as well. And I think that also gave us an opportunity,” he said.

“Because then you have a great quarterly check-in, you can come back a month later and say, you know, you told me this story, we'd love to do a case study.”

For ShowMojo, the onboarding process did double duty. On the one hand, it was a systematic way to build customer relationships and create affinity.

And on the other, it was a perfect opportunity to identify case study candidates. Which leads to Peter’s final point.

“Tuning” the Support Team to Look Out for Customer Stories

Peter made it a priority for his customer operations leaders to identify and nominate case study candidates. And they’re quite good at it.

“They can identify a customer and understand this problem about them,” he said.

“And our team has the wherewithal to say that's something that I know resonates with many other customers. It’s really coming from them and other members of the operations team who push that information up.”

But what really got the entire ops team tuned to identifying customer stories was ShowMojo’s testimonial bounty.

“Every time the support team sees something positive they could turn into a testimonial in a support ticket, they’re supposed to ask: ‘Could we just take this and put it up on the testimonial page?’ And the support person gets paid a bounty for doing that. And so that tunes the team a little bit to be on the lookout."— Peter Schuh, Founder of ShowMojo

This proactive mindset created a steady pipeline of case study candidates and made it easier for the team to ask the customer for an interview when the time was right.

Bonus Take: Making Your Customer the Hero

(Disclaimer: This is my opinion, not Peter’s or ShowMojo’s.)

Every time I write a case study, my priority is to make the customer the hero.

I think that played a role in ShowMojo's customers’ willingness to be interviewed. Customers could check out ShowMojo’s case study page and feel comfortable—maybe even excited—about how their story would be told.

Beyond helping secure customer approval, customer-centric case studies make for a better, more relevant story.

Case study readers want evidence that the product can help them solve their problem. So a good case study shows the reader how someone like them solved a problem like theirs.

Yet many case studies read like a data sheet dressed up behind a facade of customer details.

The product becomes the hero, the customer has no agency, and you lose the chance to give your reader a vision of success.

Peter and his team liked that approach. “That's one of the reasons why we liked what you were doing. There'd be little details about the customer. It was, it was always about them. It was about them and it was about their success, which I think also helped to make every one of them different,” he said.

On Chasing Big Logos vs. Hyper Relevance

ShowMojo customers include corporate property managers with portfolios containing thousands of units over multiple states as well as family-owned property managers with fewer than 200 units under management in a single city.

So I asked Peter how he thinks about the balance between going for customer stories from big logos versus small but relevant customer segments.

“I would not go for anything big in the beginning. I would go for the right mix of quality and quantity and not worry about big names at all in the beginning. There’s nothing worse than putting all your resources behind something huge [and it doesn’t pan out.]” he said.

“Once you have a critical mass of the small to medium ones, yeah, sure. Let’s try to go for a big one.”

Even then, though, Peter questioned whether the juice was worth the squeeze when it comes to chasing big logos: “You get past that wow factor, then what else do you do with that concept? Does it actually resonate with your customer base?”

Peter is on to something here. This chart from The Evidence Gap, a report by UserEvidence, backs the idea that relevance is more important than the cache of a logo.

Building to Case Study Critical Mass for Sales Enablement

Case study programs are especially vulnerable in their infancy. Corralling customers for interviews, coordinating multiple schedules, and securing approval are common momentum killers.

Even when you get past all that, you’ve got to get your sales team to use them.

The tricky part is, as Peter points out, you need a critical mass of case studies before they become truly useful.

“We had to have enough of them. We had to have critical mass,” he said.

“[Because now] when a salesperson is talking to a lead and needs something to help push them over to whatever next stage of that process is, that salesperson has two dozen case studies they can go and look through and say, ‘That problem that you were telling me about that you guys don't think is solvable? Look at this case study right here.’”

He continued: “And they can do that in different parts of the funnel too. It might be the thing to get them into a demo in the first place or to get them past the demo.”

Beyond Critical Mass, and an Opportunity for Improvement

As the library of case studies grew, it became clear that the program needed structure, strategy, and support to remain useful.

With more time, Peter says he would have focused on coaching the sales team and building a more organized system for finding and deploying stories.

“[The sales team] was aware of it. But we could have drilled it in a lot better than we did,” Peter said.

In my experience, this is very common.

As a sales enablement tool, there are two key inflection points in the process of building a repository of case studies.

The first is when you reach, what Peter called “critical mass.” That’s when you have enough stories that sales reps can reliably find one that’s relevant to the prospect they're speaking with.

Then there’s a second, less obvious inflection point when quantity gets in the way of usability. At that stage, you have so many case studies that sales reps either don’t know what’s available or can’t find what they need quickly.

ShowMojo was right on the edge of that second turning point when Peter stepped away from the business.

Inspired to Rev Up Your Customer Story Engine?

ShowMojo built a system that made stories an integral part of how they sell, market, and serve their customers.

From tuning their support team to spot stories early to building toward a critical mass of customer proof, they laid a foundation that most companies never reach.

And with the right structure in place, they’re now set up to scale those stories even further.

If that sounds like the kind of program you’d like to build, I’d love to help you make it happen.