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Presenting a well-documented use case with concrete figures enhances your credibility by demonstrating the real impact of your offering. This « before/after » approach reassures clients and investors by illustrating a tangible need and the value created by your solution through financial, social, or environmental indicators. It also strengthens the credibility of your addressable market estimation and financial projections.
When an entrepreneur presents their offering through a real and well-documented use case, they significantly enhance their credibility, strategically, commercially, and financially.
This approach is far more professional than simply juxtaposing vague concepts, which often signal a lack of fieldwork and the absence of credible market segmentation.
The benefits of using real-world use cases to shape and present the business plans of startups and SMEs are numerous, both internally and externally.
Storytelling Driven by Real-World Insights
First and foremost, presenting a real use case reassures clients and investors by demonstrating your empathy, business acumen, and market validation, showing that your commercial outreach has captured genuine needs expressed by actual stakeholders.
This approach is much more concrete than relying on personas, those so-called « ideal customers » who often exist only in the imagination of aspiring entrepreneurs.
Beyond a vague depiction of a theoretical organization, a real use case introduces actual decision-makers and users who articulate their needs and the implementation of your solution in their own words. This is the power of storytelling based on real interactions.
Presenting a Real Problem and the Value of Your Solution
By presenting a use case, you highlight a specific, pressing problem faced by a user or an organization. You then explain not only how your solution addresses this issue but also the value it creates for key stakeholders.
This value becomes even more credible when expressed through tangible indicators such as time or cost savings. When relevant, you can also quantify other key benefits like social impact, carbon footprint reduction, or risk mitigation.
Justifying the value created also clarifies your competitive advantage—directly from the perspective of those who matter most: your customers!
Justifying the Size of Your Addressable Market
Quantifying your market size becomes much more credible through this bottom-up approach, where the truly accessible market is calculated based on the number of potential transactions achievable by a realistically reachable customer base, multiplied by the average selling price of your offer.
When your customers’ willingness to pay is validated through actual transactions (or even better, a series of similar deals), you move beyond speculative assumptions, the kind that too often turn Excel into the world’s most popular virtual reality software.
Extrapolating your addressable market size and sales forecasts becomes far more convincing when based on an « archetypal » use case. Your audience will more easily grasp how your business can scale in a structured, organic manner.
A More Credible Business Model and Financial Projections
Following this commercial validation, your financial projections gain credibility through the presentation of a use case and the quantification of the number of individuals or organizations that genuinely express the need that your solution effectively addresses.
Having already made sales validates your positioning and business model. It also justifies the resources required for your growth, both technical and commercial. Understanding your sales cycle duration and quantifying other key metrics—such as customer acquisition costs—clarifies various growth assumptions, including necessary hires, commercial expenses, investments, and even working capital requirements.
Before/After: The Key to a Clear Value Proposition
Beyond recounting the discovery, adoption, and usage of your solution, succinctly qualifying and quantifying the gains generated by your offering will make a strong impression.
For example, the following case illustrates the financial and environmental benefits of energy renovation work on a 5,000 m² building. The parameters of the use case are highlighted in orange, with all subsequent calculations derived from these key figures. This case demonstrates the financial and environmental returns of an investment that pays for itself in four years, transforming an energy-inefficient property that is difficult to lease into a high-value building, increasing rental income and market value by nearly 15%.
Now, it’s your turn to adapt this approach to your own business. Best of luck in crafting and presenting use cases that are as concrete as they are convincing!
