Vantage Point Article Library
Internet, email, snail mail, telemarketing, television, radio… You’re bombarded by information every day—and so are your customers. It’s tough to make your product or service really stand out and get noticed.
What if there was a tool you could use to get your customer's attention and speed up the sales cycle and better scale your sales team? Too good to be true? Try implementing usage scenarios—brief, hypothetical examples that are relevant to buyers and used by sales to guide conversations with target customers.
Usage scenarios? Think about it. When you’re in your customer’s chair and hearing about someone else’s product, what’s really going to be helpful in making a decision? A list of features? Certainly not. Even if the sales rep talks about benefits, does that really help? Oftentimes, the “benefits” named are simply features with an adjective. We’ve all heard sales pitches telling us something’s good for us because it’s “robust” or “seamless.” (Yawn.) Even true benefit statements are presumptuous; it’s only a “benefit” if the target customer sees it that way.
Wouldn’t it be better to hear about how you could use the product or service to achieve a goal, solve a problem, or satisfy a need?
What exactly is a usage scenario? Well, rather than communicate something like “this robust product will help improve your bottom line” to prospects, a usage scenario would be “When making strategic inventory and retail pricing decisions, would it be useful to view real-time sales and inventory information in a report format?”
So, how do you develop usage scenarios? Begin by identifying your target customer titles and the “pains” they wrestle with each day (and night). If you’ve already developed your product (or service) positioning and key messages, you’re almost there. But usage scenarios take this one step further by creating examples of each need/goal/problem.
Tip: check in with your customer and professional services teams—they’re wonderful resources for gaining insight into how customers actually use your products, so you can create truly relevant and compelling scenarios.
Each usage scenario should include the following*:
Event: The circumstance causing a need for
the feature.
Question: Usage scenarios in the form of a question are
more comfortable for the buyer and more apt to develop conversation.
Player: Who will take action to respond to the event.
Action: Specific use of a feature to alleviate the pain,
stated in visual terms.
Another example: “When sending a sensitive, time-critical message to your sales team, would it be helpful to you to know with certainty that your “group” voice mail message was delivered to only the intended people?”
Usage scenarios can serve as the basis for conversations between your sales team and prospects about every product/service. This is especially important as you’re ramping up a sales force—it gives new reps a quick way to get out in the field and confidently start talking about your offerings.
Leveraging your usage scenarios in all communications will really make a difference in the effectiveness of your go-to-market efforts. Use them in sales meetings and letters, brochures, website, emails, case studies, press releases, etc.
In summary, if you take the time to develop usage scenarios and incorporate them into your customer communications and sales collateral, you’ll be able to cut through the clutter.
*Excerpt from Customer Centric Selling by Michael T. Bosworth and John R. Holland’s book.