b2b-case-study-production
Applies when real client results exist and proof assets do not. Produces a series of case studies a skeptical buyer believes and a sales team actually sends.
The job of a case study
A case study succeeds when a specific buyer recognizes their own situation in the first hundred words and finds the causality plausible all the way down. It is written for the skeptical read: a buyer who has been burned before, scanning for the seam where marketing took over from reality. Applause is a side effect. Recognition closes deals.
Real numbers, few of them
One or two verifiable anchor numbers per story. Everything else is narrative: what changed operationally, who stopped doing what, which meeting got shorter. A page carpeted in metrics reads as invented even when every figure is real, because buyers know real engagements produce two clean numbers and a lot of texture. And the rule under the rule: never fabricate, never round up, never "roughly double" a 1.7x. One invented figure, discovered, poisons every honest story in the set.
Anonymize without bleaching
Clients who refuse to be named still produce usable stories, and the disguise follows a strict trade: drop the identifiers, keep the texture. Describe the client by durable attributes, a size band, a specialty or vertical, a region, a situation, specific enough that a peer thinks "that is exactly us", general enough that a determined guesser cannot confirm the identity. The full attribute table, rounding rules, and the re-identification check are in references/anonymization-rubric.md. The mediocre version anonymizes by deleting everything interesting, leaving "a mid-sized company improved efficiency", which protects the client by making the story worthless.
Open on the pain the reader owns
The problem section is written in the buyer's own vocabulary, mined from sales calls, and aimed at the pain the reader personally absorbs, the escalations they field, the report they dread, the vendor they cannot reach. Loss framing needs care: told bluntly "you are losing money", buyers who feel fine bounce off. The version that lands describes quiet underperformance, the money that disappears a little at a time, because it matches how the reader actually experiences the problem. Steal their phrases verbatim; a buyer's own words in the opening paragraph does more work than any statistic on the page.