This article is about case studies. No, no…do not stop reading.

I have always believed that case studies are the second most boring documents produced in the entrepreneurial world after admin manuals. They are cold, dry, formulaic documents extolling the virtues of a process, product or company. Full of jargon, claims and assertions. Often trying to oversell. As a result, they are difficult to read and impossible to remember.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. After all, in most business-to-business situations it is precisely these examples of business problems that your customers have had and which your company’s product or service helped solve, that subtly, yet very persuasively show off your solutions.

Make case studies interesting to read, easy to remember and effortless

A very good way of making case studies interesting to read, easy to remember and effortless to retell is by introducing elements of a good story when writing them.

As discussed in earlier articles, a story in business is a fact wrapped in context and delivered with emotion. So we are not talking about inventing or creating stories, but using the facts we already have in our current case studies.

Now you may be wondering how can a case study about your company’s integrated oilfield water management solution for a US gas firm in a developed country have any emotion whatsoever.

Well, the person in the US gas firm who was facing the problem surely had emotions about the problem he was facing. He may have been frustrated, anxious, burned out, at his wits’ end about the problem. Surely he had emotions about the issue.

When the team in your company, using your product and services helped solve his problem, I am sure again he had emotions. A different set of emotions—relief, satisfaction, excitement about the way forward. And the success of having solved the problem, with your product’s help, may have brought him recognition, accolades and rewards. Which, in turn, would have given him emotions of pride and made him feel inspired.

Create a connection between the listener and the central character of the story

When you introduce the person at the heart of the story and tell us how he felt, you engage the listener and the listener connects with the protagonist and wants to read on to see how this challenge was solved and how it all ended happily. We all like happy endings. We like resolutions.

When we create a connection between the listener and the central character of the story and the listener resonates with “yes, I have the same problem”, this is when the case study, or what we call a success story, really hits home.

Here is an example of one of the success stories I use in my consulting practice.

As you would have noticed, the number of words used to describe Ruchira’s emotions were less than 5% of the entire text.

This approach of using success stories not only makes case studies interesting to read till the very end and easy to understand, but also has another huge benefit—like any other story, these are easy to remember and effortless to retell.

Use a story structure for your pitch

When we pitch to clients, we don’t always get to meet all decision-makers. When clients have their internal meetings to choose products, services and vendors, often only features and benefits of different offerings of different vendors are discussed, as the case studies we have left behind are either never read, or if read, never retold. Using a story structure makes it easy for these to be remembered and retold.

So go ahead and recast your case studies by incorporating the client whose problem your product solved into the heart of the story, tell us how the emotion arc changed from struggle to elation and watch us want to read your success story to the very end.

This post was originally published on LiveMint on 23 June 2015.