You have a case study everyone at the agency loves. The client is famous, the work is beautiful, and the results give your team plenty to be proud of.
It appears in almost every new business presentation. Someone suggests leaving it out, and the room gets uncomfortable.
After all, it is your best work. Why wouldn’t you show it?
The answer is simple: because your prospect may need proof of something else entirely. Your favorite case study and themost impressive case study for this prospect are not necessarily the same thing.
The case is not there to celebrate you
We see this often in agency proposals: impressive work presented without a clear explanation of why it matters to the prospect. The agency is proud of the work and eager to show it off. They think the prospect will admire the work and enthusiastically want to learn more about the agency.
But hold your horses for a moment! The prospect is likely reviewing multiple proposals and looking for clear evidence that an agency can do what the prospect needs done. It is your responsibility to make the connection obvious.
A case study should help the prospect answer a practical question: can this agency help us solve our problem? An impressive client logo may earn attention, but attention is only the beginning.
The prospect needs to understand what you faced, how you thought about it, what you did, and what happened. Most importantly, they need to understand what that experience suggests about your ability to help them.
That is a different assignment from showing your agency at its most glamorous. It is about making your agency its most relevant.
Same category does not always mean same challenge
Consider a hypothetical example. A regional retailer needs to attract first-time shoppers without relying on increasingly expensive discounts.
Your agency has two possible cases. One features a national retailer, a major celebrity, and a beautiful awareness campaign supported by a substantial budget.
The other features a regional service business. You helped it understand why prospective customers hesitated, changed how the offer was explained, and improved first time customer acquisition within a constrained budget.
The retail case offers category familiarity. The service-business case may offer more useful evidence about the actual problem.
Which should you use? Start by asking what each one proves, not which one gets you like the most.
You might use both, for different reasons. But if the second case is more relevant to the prospect’s acquisition challenge, give it the attention it deserves and explain the connection.
Category experience can matter enormously, especially when the assignment involves specialized regulations, distribution, or customer behavior. The point is not to dismiss it, but to stop treating a category match as the whole definition of relevance.
Choose the proof before choosing the case
Before opening your case library, write down what the prospect needs to believe. This should come from the brief, your research, and your conversations, not a guess about what would make your agency look good.
Perhaps they need confidence that you can grow a business with limited resources. Perhaps they need someone who understands a particular audience, can support a complex distribution system, or can work productively with a lean marketing team.
Now evaluate possible cases against those needs. A simple set of questions can help:
- Business challenge: Did we address a comparable problem or opportunity? Be specific about the connection.
- Audience: Did we reach people with relevant needs, behaviors, or buying dynamics? Demographics alone may not establish the match.
- Constraints: Did we succeed within a similar budget, competitive framework, timetable, or organizational environment? Explain the limits as well as the similarities.
- Strategic thinking: Does the case reveal how we arrived at our approach? Show more than a collection of finished assets.
- Results: Do the outcomes address what the prospect needs to achieve? An engagement result is not automatically proof of positive business impact.
Tell them why you chose it
One of the easiest improvements is also one of the most frequently overlooked. Start each selected case by explaining why it is there.
For our hypothetical retailer, the introduction might read: “We selected this case because it shows how we helped a regional business acquire new customers by addressing a barrier to purchase rather than increasing promotional discounts.”
That sentence gives the reader a reason to pay attention. It makes it clear you read their prompt, and that your agency has solved the kind of challenge they have. It also tells them what to look for as they read.
Compare it with “Here is some work we are really proud of.” The second statement describes your feelings, not the case’s relevance.
This is not a trick for dressing up unsuitable experience. If you struggle to write a credible explanation, reconsider the selection.
Then customize the emphasis, not the facts. Bring forward the parts that matter to this prospect and reduce the space devoted to unrelated details.
Do not quietly convert a brand-awareness assignment into an acquisition success story because that is what the new brief requires. Relevance cannot be manufactured by changing what the work actually achieved.
Use only as much case as the moment needs
Match the format to the job. Long form, short form, caselet or droplet. A written submission requesting detailed cases deserves “long form” cases: complete, well-organized cases.
A live presentation may call for something shorter. Sometimes one sentence connecting a recommendation to relevant experience is enough to establish credibility without changing the subject. In our book, It’s Not About You: Winning Business in a Crowded Agency World, we call that a droplet. It briefly identifies the client, challenge, approach, and outcome, giving the prospect a reason to believe without sending the conversation on a lengthy detour.
Whatever the length, keep the logic intact. The reader should not have to guess how the problem, thinking, execution, and result relate to one another.
Try this before your next submission
Take the three cases you used in your last proposal. Put the prospect’s business challenge beside them and complete this sentence for each: “We selected this case because…”
Then ask someone outside the pitch team to review the answers. Can they see why each example belongs, or are you asking them to accept that impressive work is automatically relevant work?
Keep the case that makes the strongest contribution. Shorten, replace, or remove the one that does not.
Your favorite work still deserves to be celebrated. But your prospect deserves evidence selected for them.
Steve Boehler, founder, and partner at Mercer Island Group has led consulting teams on behalf of clients as diverse as Ulta Beauty, Microsoft, UScellular, Nintendo, Kaiser Permanente, Holland America Line, Stop & Shop, Qualcomm, Brooks Running, and numerous others. He founded MIG after serving as a division president in a Fortune 100 when he was only 32. Earlier in his career, Steve Boehler cut his teeth with a decade in Brand Management at Procter & Gamble, leading brands like Tide, Pringles, and Jif.
Mercer Island Group helps marketers and agencies succeed. Company leadership is as much at home with marketers and their C-Suites as in an agency’s boardroom. With marketers, Mercer Island Group is a top 5 agency search consultancy covering all types of agency relationships (creative, media, web, PR, experiential) and assists marketers with marketing organization structure, workflow and critical skill development (briefing, creative evaluation & feedback, etc.). The company also supports leading and aspiring agencies with positioning, pitch and strategy training and pitch support.