Results
Ultimately, we wanted to help Dara generate outstanding content that would differentiate the case studies in her team’s product groups so executives would choose to share the stories with enormous conference audiences.
Creating efficiency and cost savings
We understood that our client had to work within a certain budget and we used creative approaches to maximize story impact, such as localizing stories into different languages or collaborating with other teams. “Yesler was smart about offering suggestions for how to make our dollar go further and get more life out of more assets,” says Dara. “It really helped us reduce some of the costs and improve our efficiencies within our limited budget.”
Yesler added efficiencies to Dara’s team by streamlining work, such as taking over the monthly newsletter and inputting stories into the evidence tracker. “Our account manager is doing at least four people’s worth of work in the workstream he covers,” says Dara. “The huge workload they take on as a small team is really impressive and helped us save time, accelerate story tracking, and keep everything on a good timeline.”
Agility during COVID-19
When the COVID-19 crisis happened, the team had to respond quickly to the changing business landscape. Many customers needed to fast track their digital transformation and jump into a remote working scenario for the first time. Customers that use desktops in the office suddenly needed to provide employees with Surface devices to work from anywhere.
“A flood of emails came in from the field for different customer sales, and it was very overwhelming,” says Dara. “Yesler helped us sift through at least 500 emails to find the critical data we needed to quickly create relevant content about new Surface customers.”
With economic factors shifting so suddenly, we wanted to be sensitive in how we talked about the crisis. “We have to rethink storytelling now during COVID-19,” says Dara. “Yesler was incredibly agile and brainstormed about how we could reach customers appropriately at a time when many companies are facing challenges and focusing inward. Yesler was delicate with those conversations and helped us improve our communications with the field.”
Yesler and the Surface team have continued to work together closely, responding to changes while never wavering in creating relatable, thoughtful stories. Dara claims, “I definitely consider Yesler a trusted partner. Probably 95% of the time, I forget that the account manager is a vendor—we’re so in sync working on all the programs.”