The genre problem
Case studies are read defensively, because everyone knows they were written by the vendor and approved by the client. Anything that sounds like marketing is discounted immediately, which is why the polished ones perform worst.
Specificity is the only credibility
“Improved efficiency” is discounted. “Cut the time to produce a monthly close from nine days to three” is not, because it is precise enough that it could be checked and would be humiliating to invent. Detail is the signal, and vagueness reads as concealment.
Write the number that would embarrass you if it were false. That’s the one people believe.
Include what went wrong
Every real project has a problem — a wrong assumption, a delay, a thing that had to be rebuilt. Naming one and how it was handled does more for trust than any result, because it is the part a fabricated story never contains.
Lead with the situation, not with you
Buyers scan for a company like theirs with a problem like theirs. Put the sector, the size, and the specific problem in the first two lines. Your involvement is the middle of the story, not the opening, and burying the situation costs you the readers who would have self-identified.
Make them quotable
The same structure that gets a page cited by AI search applies here: a self-contained paragraph stating the problem, the approach, and the outcome can be lifted into an answer about your category. A narrative that only works read end to end cannot.
One real one beats six thin ones
A single case study with genuine detail, named constraints, and a checkable outcome outperforms a grid of logos with a sentence each. If a client won’t let you publish specifics, that is worth negotiating at contract time rather than discovering afterwards.