Still made my sales team write 200 word case studies nobody reads

Had a meeting last month with our head of content at a cybersecurity firm in Austin. She straight up told me that our case studies were useless because they didn't follow any real buyer journey. I pushed back saying the sales team needed them for proof points. She pulled up a spreadsheet showing that out of 47 case studies published last year, exactly 3 had any engagement past week one. The worst part? She said the ones that actually got read were short, like 3 paragraphs with bullet points about real problems. But my sales director still insists on 200 word minimums and technical specs. I get that SOC managers want details, but come on. Has anyone else had content people fight your sales team on this kind of stuff?

3 comments

3 Comments

kevin_west6d agoMost Upvoted

Totally feel your pain on this one. Had our content lead and VP of sales get into it last quarter over basically the same thing. The sales guys wanted these long technical breakdowns and the content team kept saying nobody scrolls past the first screen on mobile. What finally worked for us was making the sales team pick the three most important tech specs and then letting the content team write the rest short and punchy. It was still a fight though. Hope you find a middle ground that keeps both sides from killing each other.

taylor.hayden5d ago

Between incidents" - wait, they're actually reading case studies during incident response? That's wild.

kellys786d ago

The real problem here is that nobody's talking about the actual format, (like the medium itself). That spreadsheet proves your head of content is right about engagement dropping off, but your sales director isn't totally wrong either since SOC managers do need technical details. The issue might be that your case studies are being treated like brochures instead of being designed for the way security folks actually consume info on the job (which is usually on their phone between incidents). Why not split the difference with a two-part format where the first 3 paragraphs sell the problem and the bullet points deliver the technical specs, then link out to a longer PDF for the diehards who want 200 words of specs. The sales team gets their proof points and the content team gets engagement metrics that don't look like a flatline.