Use Cases Deliver Value and Define Your Solution

Use Cases Replace RFP's, Define Success Milestones, and Deliver Value

For the Revenue Marketer, demand generation – defined as the combined set of activities of both sales and marketing in creating qualified sales leads and pulling them through the funnel – is the new required competency.

Marketing Automation (MA) software is the suite of tools or infrastructure for building a measurable demand generation practice. Though it has a marketing moniker, it is a broad and emerging category of software that has strong sales implications as well. And like many “new” technologies, it also creates change in key processes in multiple parts of your organization.

Use Cases – You don’t know what you don’t know!

The marketing department is typically the first to be introduced to marketing automation and, therefore, it is their job to help the rest of the company see the value in this type of tool. Creating a new and shared vision for what can be with marketing automation is a monumental task for which many marketing departments are unprepared.

Generic case studies only do part of the job of creating a compelling vision for how demand generation can help drive revenue for a company. Use Cases – your own custom case studies based on your specific sales and marketing environment – paint a detailed and easily understood scenario for not only how demand generation will happen, but what it will deliver.

Use Cases identify areas of primary focus for maximum revenue impact and clearly demonstrate how the proposed ROI can, and will, be achieved. The Use Case also serves as an excellent tool to help secure senior management understanding and buy in to the program. It uses custom scenarios and language that helps all key stakeholders see the vision for demand generation in the company and the role marketing automation plays.

See the Spotlight article, Building Use Cases, to learn more about what a Use Case is and how you can use them during your buying process to estimate ROI and gain key executive buy in.