Business Case Memo
WHAT WE WANT THE AUDIENCE TO THINK, FEEL, AND DO:
Think: Your solution represents the lowest risk path to their outcome.
Feel: Confident about the degree of internal consensus.
Do: Approve the purchase of your solution.
HOW IT WORKS:
Use the Neon Storytelling Framework to populate the key variables for your strategic story.
Provide the additional variables specified in the template
Invite your customer's champion to a discussion where you will highlight the importance of a business case to demonstrate the wider business impact the purchase, and that it must be their document, but that you will help prepare a first draft.
Bring a first draft to the discussion with your customer's champion.
WHY IT WORKS:
This memo is meant to be delivered as a six page or section document with more rigour than a typical presentation while remaining consumable to an audience of senior executives (C and C-1 level). However, the structure can be adapted quite easily into a slide deck if necessary.
It relates your strategic story to what you know about your customer's specific business situation. And it pays particular attention to selling the change to risk-averse CFOs.
Therefore, such a document should be an important part of your efforts to enable your champion to themselves enable their main stakeholder to sell this project to the executive team.
However, the document loses most of its power when it is clear that it was authored by you - the vendor. So, try to build it as a collaborative effort with your champion.