Intake questionnaire

Run before writing. Writing from memory or from a dashboard export produces the straight line every time, and the straight line is what reads like an ad.

Two interviews per story where possible: the delivery team, then the client. Forty-five minutes each, recorded. The delivery interview usually surfaces what to ask the client, so run it first.

The delivery team interview

Before

• What was the client doing about this before you arrived, and why was it not working?
• Who inside the client organization felt the problem most? What did it cost that person personally?
• What had they already tried and abandoned? This is the section a skeptical buyer reads hardest, because they have tried the same things.
• What did they believe about the problem that turned out to be wrong?

The work

• Walk through what actually happened, in order, including the parts that were not in the plan.
• What did you change your approach on partway through?
• What did the client have to stop doing?
• What did this require from them that they did not expect? Hours, access, a hire, an uncomfortable internal conversation.
• What would you do differently on the next one like it?

The wobble

The single highest-value question in the set: when did this nearly fail?

Follow it all the way down. What went wrong, when, who noticed, what the conversation was like, what was done about it, how long recovery took.

A story with a wobble in the middle reads true. A straight line reads like an ad. Buyers who have run projects know that nothing goes cleanly, and a case study with no friction in it tells them the account is being managed rather than described.

Expect resistance. Delivery teams are trained to present success. Ask it as "what was the hardest week" if the direct version stalls.

The numbers

• What are the two cleanest numbers from this engagement? Cleanest means directly measured, not modeled.
• Where does each one live in the engagement record, and who can confirm it?
• What was the baseline, and how was it measured before you started?
• What else moved at the same time that could account for part of the result?
• What would you refuse to claim caused what?

That last question is the causality boundary. Whatever the delivery team will not defend in the room does not go in the story.

After

• What is the client doing now that they were not doing before?
• Which meeting got shorter, which report got easier, which escalation stopped happening?
• What did they do next as a result?

The client interview

Shorter, and worth pushing for. A client's own framing of the problem is the most valuable material in the story, because it is the vocabulary other buyers use.

• How would you describe the problem to a peer at another company?
• What made you decide to do something about it when you did?
• What were you worried about before starting?
• What surprised you?
• What would you tell someone considering the same thing?
• Is there anything in here you would not want written down?

Record the exact phrasing. Steal the phrases verbatim for the problem section. A buyer's own words in the opening paragraph do more work than any statistic on the page.

The approval conversation

Run it during intake, not after the draft exists. Asking early costs nothing and shapes what gets written.

• May we name you? May we use the logo?
• May we cite this specific figure, exactly as measured?
• If not named, what level of description are you comfortable with?
• Who signs off, and what do they need to see?
• Is there an internal communications or legal step we should start now?

Bring an anonymized draft to the approval conversation where the relationship is uncertain. It speeds approval rather than skipping it, because the client is reacting to something concrete instead of imagining the worst version.

Capturing buyer language between engagements

The best operators collect one buyer phrase per sales call into a swipe file. Objections, descriptions of the problem, the way they explain it to their own boss.

That file is where problem sections come from. It costs a minute per call and compounds, and it is the difference between a problem section written in the buyer's vocabulary and one written in the vendor's.