Selling with Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud

Chapter 11

The Trojan Horse

Using Case Studies to Grab New Markets

I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other.

—Bill Gates

Capturing the right information about customers drives revenue. Capturing the right information about sales success can drive revenue through the roof.

Former Citrix chief strategist Traver Gruen-Kennedy describes how this company’s sales force used case studies to drive revenue from $0 to $500 million between 1995 and 2000.

Citrix was an early champion of cloud computing. Although this is part of Internet lexicon now, not many people were familiar with this notion when Citrix was getting started. As Gruen-Kennedy says, “We had a product at the beginning, but we didn’t have a lot of sales. We were trying to learn where [we could] bring a lot of value. Some industries and professions are very quick to transition, and others are laggards. We were [looking for] a niche that we could replicate. [We knew that if] we found it, we’d want to articulate it to everyone in our sales organization.”

Gruen-Kennedy continues, “We had a growing national and international sales force. [So we figured that] if every person wrote up one of their sales wins and we shared it with them in sales meetings, we could have build on those early wins.”

So every month, every salesperson wrote up a case study. As Gruen-Kennedy explains, “We used a one-page template. It allowed them to do it very quickly, ...