How to Leverage an Existing Case Study to Pitch to Other Companies

By Alex Berman

It's standard business advice: pick a niche. You have to find a certain industry and sell into it to achieve massive success. I think that's actually true. Our company is finding a lot of success simply selling to mobile app development companies.

Below, I outline how to use your existing case study to pitch and test out a different niche or a new market segment you've been wanting to enter. To provide a concrete example, let's assume you're a mobile app design and development company in New York City.

Identify a Case Study

There are two things to search for in the case studies you want to use. You need to find a project you executed well in the past and project with great margins.

Depending on the market you're entering, look for an amazing project you previously completed. The better the results, the better it'll look to new prospects. Sometimes you won't have a good fit. In that case, you'll have to work with what you do have.

In our example, you're a mobile app development agency. So you'd look for an app project you have completed. If you only do backend work and you're relying on someone else for design, you probably have a lot of projects without quality design. Make sure the project looks great. After that, identify an industry fit in terms of what you want to offer. What industry is going to buy? Go through your existing case studies. If you find, that for example, you seem to have a lot of clothing brands, go with clothing and fashion brands as your industry of choice. Then pick a case study that you already have created based on a clothing brand.

Let's say you pick a case study on the brand Lululemon. The most important question right here is: How are you going to find additional target brands?

Next, we...

Replicate the Client

You are now in search of a list or a directory that has this type of company and all the accompanying information. Google top companies and find a lead list. If you Google around a little more, you'll find more and more lists. One that pops out to me is: "fashion top 100 companies." There's a list of a hundred fashion companies. This would be your lead list.

After you find their contact information, you...

Pitch the Idea

The final challenge is to come up with a great pitch and actually get a meeting booked. So let's see how to craft a cold email that converts. Let's target Dior first because they were deep down the list. Create a simple subject line like "From a Fan of Dior" or "About Dior."

Notice that this is customized for luxury clothing companies. You want to make it niche enough that it seems like your writing directly to the person you're sending it to but also generic enough that you can send it to all hundreds of these fashion companies and not have them feel like you're spamming them.

Send only to luxury fashion brands so you can take those case studies from earlier and turn them into pitches in this cold email.

Remember Lululemon? Use that example to explain how you would help Dior. Suggest improving their e-commerce app similarly (four stars in the app store). You can even link to the actual app itself.

Then, pick another case study to link to. For instance, if you helped another company organize their artist community, you could pitch that to 138 of these fashion companies with something like: "You might also get value out of an app that organizes your community similar to what we did for Threadless." And obviously, note that you will tweak these ideas. It's always good to get in touch with somebody from one of these companies and ask them what they want.

Normally, the best place to start is the person that you're actually selling to in the case study. For instance, if you were working with dev shop, you would want to talk to someone at Lululemon to figure out why they bought. That way you can tweak the type of ideas you're pitching and the actual examples to make them resonate even more.

This is basically what a cold email to these companies would look like. Happy selling!

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Alex Berman is Chairman and Founder of marketing and lead generation agency Experiment 27 . Weekly video creator on B2B selling and agency growth.