Know What It’s For
Your impact on customers’ businesses will be different for each use case
Understanding a customer’s industry and corporate objectives is the first step in defining the context for your products. Many vendors stop there, with the result that the generic value propositions such as raising revenue, improving customer loyalty, and lowering cost lose credibility in the din.
A compelling value proposition must be relevant, as well as tangible, provable, and unique. Creating such value claims requires a deeper understanding of the use case—the purpose for which customers use your products or services. Use cases address the simple question of “What’s it for?” The answer is the key to identifying where and how you offer the greatest value. Consider, for example, a simple screw. It holds things together. That description alone fails to define its value. Holding a cabinet knob in place carries a very different value than holding together an airplane wing. The value hinges on the use case much more than on the differences in materials or manufacturing.
Use cases consist of the scenarios, people, processes, and systems that contribute to some corporate objective. Defining value within the context of a use case creates immediate relevance. Only through the use case can you fill in the details that lend credibility and demonstrate uniqueness in how your product’s capabilities relate to high-level corporate objectives.
Find target use cases by identifying the business processes, functions, and challenges that most frequently form the context for customer purchases. Examine how critical each use case is to customers today and in the future and what role you play within it. Use cases that are top of mind for customers and within which you can deliver significant benefits are those that warrant enhancements of products and services. Use cases where you can create significant impact, but which are a lower priority to customers, can drive sales and marketing content without changes to the product road map. Where your impact is smaller, consider participating in partners’ solutions that target such use cases more directly.
Figure 5: Selecting Target Use Cases
Interview customers to identify the key metrics within each use case and how you’ve helped improve these. Learn the language decision makers use to describe their area of responsibility and how they think about your products within that context. These testimonials create the basis of proof for use case-based value propositions.
To move away from a product-centric mentality, Informatica proactively engaged customers in developing use cases. The company hired a user experience team to help understand how customers worked with data and how Informatica could help them. “The use case approach exposes what the customer is trying to get done, and therefore how they expect the solution to work,” commented Judy Ko, senior vice president of Product Management and Marketing at Informatica. The approach has been so effective that use cases now drive Informatica’s product road maps and cross-product requirements.