It was a good run, B2B case studies.

More than 10 years ago I caught my break as a writer. After spending the first half of my career toiling in various sales and account management roles, despite wanting to be a writer, I managed to latch on with a marketing agency who wanted to cultivate my interest and passion for writing and were willing to teach me ins and outs of B2B marketing writing, beginning with customer case studies.

Given my background, this next statement might sound a bit weird:

It's time to kill the B2B case study.

Conventional customer marketing is a waste of time, money, and opportunity

Ask any B2B marketer and they’ll tell you that case studies are 100% critical to their success. For eons, marketers have relied on case studies to provide some outside validation of the claims they make about a product or service. And today, more than half of all B2B buyers say that case studies are a core element to their purchasing process.

Naturally, then, everyone and her brother is racing to crank out as many case studies as possible to cover as many use cases as possible. I regularly get requests 3, 4, 8 case studies at a time, spread over a couple months or a quarter, because in many marketers' minds "more is better."

The more case studies they have, the more content they can plaster all over Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to show prospective customers that theirs is a business that should be taken seriously.

But the novelty of the marketing case study has worn completely off and devolved into a stale, outdated, and ineffective cliché.

Same old, same old

Take a look at the case studies most companies pump out and you’ll see that they almost always follow a Challenge, Solution, Benefit (CSB) structure. Fine, nothing wrong with that. However, they also universally speak from the perspective of the brand, not the customer. They use phrases like “our customer was challenged with” and “we solved problem X with solution Y."

B2B case studies as we've always known them are impersonal—almost clinical—and indescribably boring. They focus too heavily on the seller’s business and their solution’s features, benefits, and outcomes, but say nothing about what it’s actually like to be a customer. It's a 30,000 foot view of a scenario that's best examined up close.

Consider this: as a prospect thinking about doing business with you, it’s already easy enough for me to learn all about the different features, functions, and capabilities of your product or service because the info is plastered all over your website.

I'm going to need a little more to go on than just regurgitated sales copy if you’re going to convince me to spend my limited financial resources and maybe even my personal capital on a new product.

Instead, I want to know what the experience of working with you is like—everything from the sales process to implementation, onboarding, and post-deployment support. I want to know how your existing customers found you and how you nurture those relationships.

I want to know what your other customers’ decision-making processes were like, the other solutions they considered, and what factors specifically led them to choose you over another option. And I want to know how working with you and your products or services has made their jobs easier and their lives better on a day-to-day basis, down to minute details.

Your bullet-point case studies can’t do any of that.

Death of the case study, rise of the success story

As case studies (hopefully) continue their slow death spiral toward irrelevance, customer success stories are emerging in their place. Some marketers might argue that case studies and success stories are the same thing, but the reality is that the differences between them go much further than mere semantics.

Research suggests that our brains love storytelling because it increases the release of oxytocin, the “happy” hormone. The tension and drama of a good story literally changes brain chemistry to increase our attention so we can follow along and understand the nuances and finer details. At the same time, that increased attention also makes us more amenable to cooperation or taking a specific recommended action from that story.

The upshot is that a well-crafted customer story of virtually any length is the ideal vehicle for demonstrating your company’s value beyond product features and benefits—and getting your intended audience to believe it.

Unlike their brand-focused predecessors, customer success stories take a narrative-style approach to illustrating the entire customer experience, using direct customer quotes and a story-like description to convey in detail how they’ve used a particular product or service to overcome specific business challenges, support the needs of various teams across the organization, and achieve measurable and meaningful outcomes.

A well-produced story—whether in written form or in video—should highlight the human reasons for buying your product or service. It should go beyond just explaining what the business challenges were that a customer faced and explore how those challenges impacted his or her team, the business as a whole, and its customers on a daily basis for color and context.

It should dive into how those effects influenced their decision-making process, calling particular attention to the other vendors the customer evaluated and laying out the specific reasons they chose your company over another.

Mostly, though, it should feature a customer with whom prospects can easily identify and relate, preferably someone with a similar title and role to their own, with problems and pain points that mirror their own daily struggles. Your audience should look at it (or read it) and immediately think, “Hey! I’m in that same situation! I have those same problems and would love a similar outcome.”

Different approach, better results

Leaving behind the “look how great we are!” promotional copy in favor of a “look at the amazing things our customers are doing and how smart they are for choosing our product to do it” is a radical shift for many marketers. But it’s a necessary one that’ll pay off down the line.

Peers telling their stories about their business outcomes and customer experiences is a critical tool for marketers to create quality content that cuts through the ever-increasing amount of noise in the market. And as business buyers become increasingly savvier and more numerous—B2B tech buying now includes nearly 7 people or groups in the process, up from under 6 just a couple years ago—the customer success story will provide infinitely more flexibility and opportunity to address each one in a meaningful, personalized way