The format is popular and the material is usually gone
Case studies are among the most used formats in B2B, and among the hardest to source.
Open any B2B vendor’s resources page and the case studies are there, next to the blog and the videos. Ask the marketer who runs that page which format the sales team asks for and it’s the case studies again. That tells you what the industry leans on, and nothing about whether any one case study worked.
The problem shows up on the sourcing side. On marketing forums the same 2 complaints come up whenever the format is mentioned. The first: the case study was a layout job rather than a writing one, built from a reused template because there was never enough material for anything else. The second, from someone who has finished a project and only now wants a story from it: how do I go back to a client I never asked?
Both problems start earlier than they look. The material was available during the project and nobody collected it.
Permission, before anything else
We start here, because everything else is wasted if this comes back no.
You need 3 separate permissions, and they get confused with each other. Permission to be named. Permission to publish specific figures. Permission for 1 person to be quoted and shown by name and title. Your customer can grant any one and refuse the others, and legal teams routinely do exactly that.
Ask for all 3 at once, in writing, and ask early. We want them before the interview, not after the draft. A request made 2 weeks after go-live, while the customer is pleased, gets a different answer than the same request made in month seven.
If the answer is partial, that’s still workable. “A logistics operator with 400 vehicles” carries a story. It carries it less well than a name, and it’s fair to know that before you plan the piece around a logo.
The before state, which nobody writes down at the time
Ask your operations lead today how long the old process took. You’ll get a range, and the range will be a guess.
Nobody on your side records how long the old process took, because at the time it was just how things were. Six months later the number is a guess, and a guessed baseline makes the result meaningless. A result stated without a baseline is a decoration.
Collect it while your project is live, or in the first weeks after: cycle times, error rates, headcount on the task, how long onboarding ran, what the workaround was. For our money, a single timing sheet from before the change does more for the finished piece than any interview.
We ask for that sheet before we write. If your team already has one, the result section is half written before anyone talks to anyone.
The numbers, and who is allowed to say them
We attach 3 things to every figure: the period it covers, how it was measured, and the person who will stand behind it.
A 30% improvement with no period is not a number. Over what, compared to what, measured by whom. If it came out of the customer’s own dashboard, say so. If your team calculated it, say that too, because a buyer reading the piece will assume the more favourable interpretation and be annoyed later when it doesn’t hold.
Agree every figure with the person who gave it to you, before publication rather than after. On the case studies we write, numbers go to the customer in writing and get approved before anything is published. That approval takes 10 minutes when each figure is marked, and a week when the customer has to hunt for what changed.
If you can’t say where a figure came from, it doesn’t go in the piece.
The part that went wrong
Every real project of yours has one, and leaving it out costs more than including it.
The integration nobody scoped. Four weeks of data cleanup. A department that held out for a month. A buyer who has run a project of this kind knows those exist, and an account with none of them reads like a brochure someone wrote afterwards.
Collect it while your team is still willing to say it. Ask what surprised them, what they’d do differently, and what they’d tell a company about to start the same thing. Those 3 questions produce the most quoted lines in the finished piece.
We ask for the fix alongside it. Friction plus what you did about it is a stronger argument than a clean run.
The customer’s own words
The lines your readers quote back are almost always things the customer said, not things the vendor wrote about them.
That means a call with your customer. 30 to 40 minutes is enough, and it works better when the questions go out in advance so the customer can look things up rather than estimate on the spot. We write the questions and run the call ourselves, on the same principle that makes a written brief cheaper than a conversation about one.
Six prompts carry most calls:
- The situation before, and what it was costing.
- What made them start looking.
- Who else was in the decision, and what each of them needed convinced of.
- What turned out harder than expected.
- What’s measurably different now, and over what period.
- What they’d tell a company about to do the same thing.
Record the call with permission, so any quote can be checked against what was actually said. Paraphrase from memory and you’ll publish a line your customer didn’t say, then spend the revision round taking it back out.
When the customer won’t talk
Sometimes there’s no call and no name. The piece is still writeable, and it’s worth saying what it costs.
From your side you can reconstruct the situation, the work and the timeline out of project material: scope documents, tickets, reports, invoices, dashboards. What you can’t reconstruct is the reason they bought and the internal argument they had to win. That’s the part buyers read for.
We treat an anonymised piece built from your own records as a legitimate format. So is a composite, built from several projects to show how the work goes, as long as the page says that’s what it is. The logistics case study in our portfolio is a composite and it’s labelled as one, because a demonstration piece presented as a real client is the kind of claim that gets a supplier fired.
The approval path, and how long to allow
Plan approval as a stage of your own project, with its own duration. It usually has more people in it than the writing does.
Ask who signs off on your customer’s side. Marketing, legal, and the executive quoted are 3 different approvals, and each can send it back. We ask the same about your side before we quote.
We don’t quote a typical approval duration, because the honest answer is that it depends on the customer’s legal team, and we haven’t seen it measured on a sample we’d plan against. What we can say is that stalls are ordinary: most customer-marketing teams can name at least 1 case study that was written, approved internally, and never published because the customer’s side said no at the end. The way to survive that stage is to have your permissions in writing before the interview rather than after the draft.
The collection sheet
This is what we ask for, and it’s worth getting out of your team before the project memory fades:
- Permissions. Name, figures, quoted person, all 3, in writing.
- Baseline. The before numbers, with dates and how they were measured.
- Result. The after numbers, same treatment, plus the period they cover.
- Timeline. Start, go-live, and what slipped.
- People. Who decided, who used it, who to interview.
- Friction. What went wrong and what fixed it.
- Material. Scope documents, reports, screenshots, dashboards.
- Constraints. What can’t be published, and who says so.
While the project is live your team can fill that list from memory and open files, in an afternoon. A year later they’re reconstructing it from invoices, and what comes back is estimates.
The format, the interview and how we quote it are on the case study writing page. We publish the logistics piece in full, so you can see what collected material turns into.
Send us the project you’d write up and whatever of the list above exists. You get a scope and a price within one working day.