Turning bite-sized customer stories into Gravity Wiz’s most beloved sales asset

Ah yes, case studies. Invaluable marketing assets, and yet, very overdone — with too many done too poorly. It’s not uncommon to see the word Case Studies and look right past it — as if, almost an unintentional blindness and aversion due to corporate saturation.

Yet this is how we communicate the value of our products, services, and teams.

With Gravity Wiz, customers are more than happy to share their builds — often achieving incredible feats — and complex business workflows using our products.

I wanted to make it as easy as possible to share these with us, and in turn, make it as easy as possible to share them with our customers and turn them into valuable marketing assets.

I worked with Gravity Wiz’s CEO to build out the Spotlight format and the operating system for sourcing, producing, and promoting it.

The concept: it’s lightweight. It doesn’t have to be extensive. It’s value-focused. Bite-sized. We want to tell a customer’s success story and how our products may have helped.

1. Added an option to volunteer for a spotlight on our existing leave-a-review form. If a customer is here, they are already likely happy about their experience, and more likely to share.
2. Implemented a company-wide process for identifying strong Spotlight candidates.
   • When the support team is having a positive customer interaction (a common thing at Gravity Wiz), they are more likely to share. So I built a handoff process to pass leads off to marketing while they’re hot.
3. Introduced an internal Spotlight bounty.
   • Encouraged support staff to surface customers whose builds would make strong stories.
   • Paid the bounty when a referred Spotlight was published.
4. Developed a concise interview template.
   • This is a reusable template that anyone can use — it asks common questions like what inspired the build, what the customer created, what changed, and how Gravity Wiz products contributed.
   • Included an open-ended question to capture unexpected testimonials and detail.
5. Identified and defined the storytelling structure.
   • After discovering what resonates most with readers, I defined a spotlight structure. This is non-fiction storytelling, after all.
6. Built team templates and operating documents.
   • Created process documentation, question templates, and writing templates for coordinated production.
7. Extended the workflow across the company so support, marketing, and leadership could contribute consistently.