Stories that sell – Case Studies for Dorian’s Dronedesk

Stories that sell – Case Studies for Dorian’s Dronedesk

Every word on your website, your brochures, your adverts. They’re all examples of you talking the talk. And prospects need to know you can walk the walk.

A case study is an opportunity for you to shut up and let a customer speak directly to a prospect and reassure them that everything your copy says is true.

That’s what Dorian Ellis wanted. He just didn’t have the time to do it.

A case study brings to life the value of the product more than marketing copy can. It’s a way of getting a client, who the prospect identifies with, to demonstrate the product.

Dorian Ellis, Founder of Dronedesk

Meet Dorian

Dorian founded Dronedesk in 2018 after jumping off the corporate merry-go-round and deciding he quite fancied working outdoors for a change. He signed up for a commercial drone operator course and soon realised there wasn’t a decent piece of software for planning drone flights.

Fast forward four years and Dorian is at his desk coding an all-in one platform that makes it easy for drone operators to plan flights, check flight conditions and airspace, seek permissions, do risk assessments, manage clients, log flights, issue invoices, and much more.

So not quite as outdoors as he’d planned.

But Dronedesk was proving popular, and Dorian knew that sharing the stories of his happy customers would help his business grow.

Customer trust is really important as a small company. People naturally migrate to big brands so, as a small company, building client trust is crucial. And social proof is a critical element of that. People are getting more sceptical about reviews. But case studies have real, genuine value. They carry a far greater weight than small reviews on some random website.

Dorian Ellis, Founder of Dronedesk

But he had two problems. Firstly, he didn’t have the time.

It’s just the time involved. As a small business owner, you’ve got to wear very many hats. My primary role was developing the application!

Dorian Ellis, Founder of Dronedesk

Secondly, Dorian knew he wasn’t the right person to do the job.

If you write the case study yourself, it ends up sounding like a sales pitch. Getting a third party to speak to clients means you get their honest opinion, which is a far better approach than trying to do it yourself.

Dorian Ellis, Founder of Dronedesk

Luckily, the right person fell into his lap. Because when one of his data suppliers asked if he’d be willing to do a case study for them, who should pop up on his screen when he sits down for the call?

Yours truly.

And after working with me and seeing the copy I wrote, Dorian realised he’d found the right person to help him write case studies for Dronedesk.

 And I didn’t look around anywhere else. I really liked James’ approach. I really liked his writing style. And I thought, well, why spend weeks trying to find somebody else?

Dorian Ellis, Founder of Dronedesk

Speaking to the right people

The first thing we did was figure out who we wanted to speak to. After all, a case study is meant to tell the story of someone the prospect can identify with. There’s no point in sitting down with a kid who wants to be Captain Marvel and telling her a story about Aquaman.

You can’t treat all customers the same because they all have very different requirements. A photographer flying a drone at a wedding has different requirements to someone flying a drone around an oil rig. So I think it’s really important to drill down to a use case that matches what the prospects are looking for. 

Dorian Ellis, Founder of Dronedesk

So Dorian and I identified six types of prospect that Dorian wanted to attract, and then six customers who fit the bill. Dorian introduced me to them, and then I scheduled and conducted the interviews before writing up the case studies. As ever, my goal was to minimise the amount of work my client had to do. After all, Dorian was busy making Dronedesk amazing!

What followed was six months of fascinating conversations with all sorts of people. Photographers, mountain rescue teams, franchise operators, and more besides. Each of them with different needs and desires and priorities, and each of them using Dronedesk in different ways.

And the end result was six very different case studies that spoke to six very different types of prospect. Did they do the job?

Dorian wasn’t so sure at first.

Turning heads

I thought I wanted people to go, “Oh crikey, National Grid are using Dronedesk.” But James had written about the individuals at the businesses.

Dorian Ellis, Founder of Dronedesk

Personalisation is what elevates a great case study over a good one. Dorian was absolutely right: name-dropping National Grid is going to impress people. But hearing how Dronedesk solved the problems of someone with the same job as you? That’s a personal promise.

Now the case study is doing more than dropping a name. It’s helping the decision maker envision how the product will make their life easier.

James pointed out it’s the individual within National Grid that gets the benefit from Dronedesk and the individual who’s going to make the decision about whether to buy or not.

Dorian Ellis, Founder of Dronedesk

And that’s why the copy uses so many of the customer’s words. Because it’s their story. Not yours

I think the quotes are important because it means the case study speaks in the language the prospects are using.

Dorian Ellis, Founder of Dronedesk

Caseloads of benefits

Now Dorian has a suite of case studies to demonstrate just how good his platform is. And they’re all targeted to his customers’ differing use cases. 

Sometimes this helps Dorian when he’s speaking to new customers: he can point directly to the relevant case study to help the customer understand exactly how Dronedesk can help.

I can tell new customers to look at our case study about how Dronedesk is used in operations like theirs. It’s really great to be able to use the case studies to help people understand how drones are used in their niche.

Dorian Ellis, Founder of Dronedesk

And, of course, Dorian’s case studies do their most important job: the help prospects read about customers just like them. They help prospects identify with existing customers. They help prospects see just what their life would be like if they picked up the phone and called Dorian. And then they do.

A prospect had been going through a big tender process, looked at the website and went straight to the National Grid case study. I did a demo for them and they were constantly mentioning the case study as a point of reference. They were using it to understand how the system would fit their requirements.

Dorian Ellis, Founder of Dronedesk

In fact, Dorian was so pleased with his case studies that he asked me to write some more! And Dorian is such a pleasure to work with, I leapt at the chance.

The case studies that James wrote have been a huge success. They’ve helped us to attract new clients and to grow our business. 

Dorian Ellis, Founder of Dronedesk

If you want to tell your prospects stories that get them hitting the buy button, let’s write a case study for them! Get in touch today and we’ll work on creating case studies that turn prospects into customers.

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