Build Logical Value Stories
A customer who agrees with your logic essentially agrees with your business case
A key to creating a unique and credible value proposition is the ability to demonstrate why it’s true in a way that is relevant to specific customer situations. The use case provides the basis for a direct, tangible, and quantifiable connection between what you offer and what the customer values. This use case-driven value story defines the specifics of the relationships between products, tasks, processes, and objectives.
Develop value stories jointly with customers. Since the relationships within the value story are the core of your business case, a customer who agrees with your logic essentially agrees with your business case before a single calculation is done.
To demonstrate the relationship between a product and high-level business objectives, build a use case-driven value story from the top down, and from the bottom up. First, determine how the use case relates to high-level business objectives. Next, drill down to the specific objectives for the use case itself. There will be many objectives for any use case you identify. Build your business case around those that are of high importance to the customer, that you can influence, and that have quantitative metrics or key business process indicators (KPIs) in place. Objectives that the customer is not measuring quantitatively are great components of the qualitative portion of your value proposition, but are insufficient to justify spending hard cash.
Figure 6: Building a Use Case-Driven Value Story
Each use case objective will have multiple processes and factors that contribute to its success. It’s likely your customers measure these or can estimate quantitatively some core metrics. In turn, each of these metrics is driven by more granular factors. Drill down to the elements that you can influence directly. While you identify what you can influence, note the metrics that you can’t impact. They will be the assumptions within your business case.
From the bottom up, list the features and capabilities of your products. Identify which ones are relevant to the key tasks within the given use case. Look at past deployments and customer success stories, or conduct customer interviews to identify the quantitative improvements you’ve enabled in the performance of these tasks.
Finally, connect the improvements in tasks to the process and use case metrics you previously identified. Since you already know how these metrics relate to use case objectives, and how those objectives relate to corporate goals, you have a logical value story in place. Before you plug in any numbers, it’s absolutely critical to review this story with your customers and make sure they agree with the logic. If your prospects agree that the improvement in specific tasks drives better process and use case metrics, and that these in turn impact business objectives, your business case is made.
A workbook for creating your use case-driven value story is available at http://www.shirmangroup.com/resources.htm.