Which customer story is worth telling

Most businesses pick their case study candidate the same way: whoever said something nice most recently, or whoever the account manager likes best. Neither is a reason a prospect should care.

The ebook in this kit, Deal-Breaking Case Studies Creation, replaces that instinct with a scorecard. Score every candidate the same way, rank them, and the decision about who gets written up stops being a guess.

The case-study candidate scorecard

The book scores each potential story on three pillars, weighted unevenly on purpose.

• Measurable impact (40%). Concrete before-and-after numbers: revenue growth, cost reduction, faster time-to-value. The book calls out one "North Star metric" per candidate, the single number that best proves the result, backed by two or three supporting figures.
• Strategic relevance (35%). Whether the story features your priority solution, your target industry, or an objection your sales team hears often. A story can score high here even with modest numbers: a case that quiets your team's most common objection is worth developing on relevance alone.
• Emotional resonance (25%). Whether there's a vocal, quotable champion willing to be featured, someone whose challenge and turnaround a prospect can see themselves in. Facts alone rarely close a deal; a specific person going through a specific problem does more of the work.

The book's own worked example scores three candidates this way: Acme SaaS at 32/30/20 for a total of 82, Beta Corp at 25/32/18 for 75, Gamma Ltd at 35/15/22 for 72. Acme wins clearly, not because any single number is the highest, but because it's the strongest combination across all three. Notice that Gamma actually posts the highest impact score of the three, 35 out of 40, and still finishes last overall: a reminder that the scorecard is deliberately built to punish a story that's all metrics and no relevance or emotional pull.

Once every candidate has a score, the book sorts them into three tiers: above 75 is a "go," meaning start development now; 60 to 75 goes "on hold" for next quarter; anything under 60 gets dropped from consideration entirely. That third bucket matters as much as the first: it stops teams from spending three weeks polishing a story that was never going to convince anyone.

Before investing further time in a high scorer, the book recommends one more step: a 15-minute check with whoever owns the client relationship, specifically to surface restrictive NDAs, recent leadership turnover at the client, or a live competitive evaluation that could complicate approval later. Skipping this is how a strong case study dies in legal review three weeks in.

Where the client won't share exact figures, the book has a fallback that keeps the story usable: report a range instead of a number. "Would it be fair to say costs decreased by double digits, or over 25%?" preserves confidentiality while still giving a prospect something concrete to weigh. Positioning results against an industry benchmark ("40% faster than the industry average") works the same way when the absolute figures are off the table entirely.

Where people go wrong

The most common error is scoring on impressive numbers alone and skipping relevance, which produces case studies that wow nobody because they're not about the objection prospects actually raise. A second is chasing the loudest advocate instead of the best-scoring one: enthusiasm photographs well but doesn't always carry a number a CFO would act on. A third is treating this as a one-time exercise rather than a recurring one; the book recommends rescoring the whole pipeline quarterly, since a marginal story today can become next quarter's best candidate as a client hits new milestones. The same discipline about knowing what actually moves a deal forward runs through the Sales & Closing Pack as a whole.