What's the use case? (Seth Godin blog) - Blog - Creative Presentations Ideas

Here’s a simple diagram sketch of excellent Seth Godin’s blog “What’s the use case?” (original blog here).

The article got my attention, I used to work in business development job, where it was a common to start a presentation or talk with offering a solution – the product or service my company was providing. However, this is not approach a good salesman should follow.

Seth writes about a right way to sell your ideas: ‘The most effective way to sell the execution of an idea is to describe the use case first. And before you can do that, you need to have both the trust of your client and enough information to figure out what would delight them.’

Usually as a company representative, we are familiar and inspired with solution we offer. However, it’s imporant to remember that people don’t actually know the word about it. That is why it is important to figure out if a person wants a result your project is supposed to deliver. Secondly, the important point is to gain trust from your client. It takes a time, research, pre-sales conversations, but it’s worth it.

I liked that new approach from a start. For better remembering it, I started to sketchnote the essence for myself. That is how I see the visualization of this particular idea:

diagram blog sales conversation illustration ppt infodiagram

This is a simple diagram visualization I made in PowerPoint to express the main points and flow of the message from Seth’s article (I used handdrawn design elements from: www.InfoDiagram.com, but basically even standard rectangle and arrow shapes would do the work).

Notice that having a simple flow chart helps a lot in getting the idea right away. You naturally know where it starts and where it heads, if you follow the standard left to right reading flow.

Reading Seth’s blogs and sketching their essence is an excellent way to exercise simple visualization skills. I would recommend it to everyone who is interested in practising visual thinking day by day. Seth Godin blogs are fast to read and they are full of great messages.