What is use case based sales?

The framework is simple in principle, instead of selling a product or a package, you sell the outcome the customer is trying to achieve.

"Use case-based sales takes into account all the old sales methodologies the MEDDIC, the Sandler selling all those things you can incorporate into this,"

Simon explains. "You're just reframing your product and packaging to the use case that the customer is looking to accomplish."

In practice, this means the sales conversation starts differently. Rather than walking through features or explaining credit tiers, the rep asks what the buyer is trying to get done.

Simon gives an example: "A customer comes to you and says, 'Hey, I'm looking to route inbound leads more effectively because we're not catching all of them and we could be making more money.' Okay, that is a fantastic use case. Let's build a model around that use case."

From there, the conversation shifts to scoping the outcome. What does success look like, what's the ROI, and what does it take to get there. Credits or tokens still exist, but they become a means to an end rather than the thing being sold.

"You're not buying a package that has X number of credits. You're buying the outcome of this use case. And to do that, we need to invest in this number of credits,"

Simon says. "The tokens are just an ancillary currency. It's not something that is our core package deliverable."

This reframe does two things. It makes the price easier to justify because it's tied to something concrete. And it makes the product easier to understand because the buyer isn't left guessing what their credits will actually get them.

Why does the outcome based selling approach works?

Every pricing model has a workaround. Seat licenses get shared

"you could sell five seats to a customer and then they can share all the passwords on one password and then there's 15 people using those five seats," Simon points out.

Credit systems get hoarded or gamed. Flat fees get arbitraged by heavy users.

Outcome based pricing is harder to manipulate because the incentive structure changes.

"Whatever pricing model you have, you can gamify it," Simon says. "But I think the closer you get to the desired outcome, the harder it's going to be to gamify and the easier it's going to be to justify that spend."

The logic is simple when spending more directly produces more of the thing the buyer wants, the conversation stops being about budget optimization and starts being about value capture.

Simon draws on cloud computing as a reference point.

"You're not going in there looking to spend $50,000. You're not setting a budget to say, okay, I'm only going to spend $50,000. If you need to compute more to deliver for your customers, you're going to spend more because that's the desired outcome."

The same principle applies to AI products when priced around outcomes. Less spend means less of the result. More spend means more. There's no arbitrage opportunity because the price and the value move together.

"Pricing, margin ideally goes up as they buy more, but then ROI goes up, their outcomes—everything is going in that direction," Simon explains. "And that's how you build that virality and that scale as a business."

This alignment also removes friction from expansion conversations. When the customer already understands that more investment equals more output, upsells stop feeling like negotiation and start feeling like a natural next step.

What changes across packaging, pricing, and compensation

Adopting use case based sales isn't just a messaging shift. It restructures how the go-to-market motion operates.

1. Packaging becomes use case-driven, not feature-driven

Traditional SaaS packaging lists features and caps. Use case-based packaging starts with what buyers are trying to accomplish and works backward to what that requires.

"The packages are not about the feature flags and the predefined outcomes," Simon says. "It's more about, hey, this is why people buy it here are the use cases they look to accomplish, not the features and functionality."

On a pricing page, this might look like: "Most companies in the startup space will buy 50,000 credits to accomplish this use case, this use case, this use case.

Most companies in the enterprise will spend five million credits to accomplish this use case, this use case, this use case." The packaging communicates what buyers can get done, not just what they get access to.

2. Pricing moves away from cost-plus logic

When your price is tied to the cost of the underlying model, you're exposed every time that cost shifts. And you're racing competitors to the bottom.

"Focus on the value you're providing," Simon advises. "Make sure your margin for cost is aligning with your financial model. But essentially, don't do cost-plus." When pricing reflects outcomes, model cost reductions improve margin instead of compressing price.

There's another layer here. Not all tokens are equal. "Every token spent on inbound is drastically more valuable than every token spent on outbound," Simon explains.

A use case that captures high-intent demand is worth more than one that automates routine tasks even if both consume the same credits.

3. Compensation rewards growth, not just acquisition

Traditional SaaS comp structures incentivize new logos. The rep closes the deal, gets paid, and moves on. What happens next is someone else's problem.

"Traditional SaaS is new logo. Bang. I'm just going to throw this deal in, throw the grenade over the fence to customer success,"

Simon says. "That pays out the individual contributor, but it doesn't pay out the business in the long term."

Use case-based selling changes this. Reps should be stack ranking use cases with each account, landing the most urgent ones first, and expanding over time.

"Any use cases that you've modeled out with them that they want to accomplish that aren't top of mind right now is the clearest path to white space upsell and cross-selling in the future."

The comp structure has to reflect that. "If you can tie compensation of your reps to consumption growth within an account, it's going to set everybody on the same path. Everyone aligns towards business growth."

What this demands from your billing infrastructure

Use case-based sales sounds good in theory. In practice, it falls apart if the billing layer can't keep up.

Simon describes what happens when it doesn't:

"We were just rebuilding all that logic in a Google spreadsheet or an Excel spreadsheet and doing all pricing and packaging outside of the CPQ which of course leads to discrepancies between the spreadsheet and the source of truth."

The result is reps quoting one thing, finance seeing another, and no one trusting the numbers.

It also makes onboarding painful.

"It was really difficult to train any new reps when they came on because it's like, hey, here's how you do this crazy click path in the CPQ, but also here's this spreadsheet and please don't click any cells but the ones that are highlighted in yellow or else you're going to break it."

To actually operationalize use case-based selling, billing infrastructure needs to support a few things:

Hybrid pricing models

Most AI companies aren't going pure consumption overnight.

"What's working the best today is package plus consumption or package plus usage," Simon says. "Hey, you're going to buy X number of seats plus you get this limit of credits, you can always buy more."

The billing system has to support that blend natively not through workarounds.

Real-time usage tracking

If reps are scoping deals around use cases and credit estimates, they need visibility into how those credits are actually being consumed.

So does the customer. Delayed or batch-based metering makes it impossible to have informed conversations about expansion.

Flexible entitlements

Different customers buy different use case bundles. The system has to support that without requiring engineering work every time a new configuration is sold.

Room to experiment

Pricing in AI is not settled. Companies need to test models, credit tiers, outcome-based pricing, hybrid structures without rebuilding their billing stack each time.

Legacy billing tools were built for subscription logic: fixed seats, annual contracts, predictable revenue. They weren't designed for the variability and experimentation AI pricing requires.

Tools like Flexprice exist specifically to close that gap built for real-time usage, credits, and pricing experimentation rather than retrofitting subscription infrastructure to do something it wasn't made for.

The direction AI pricing is headed

Simon's advice for founders thinking about pricing is blunt:

"Simplicity is key. Number one. Number two, focus on the desired outcome that you're looking to solve for your customer and have candid conversations about how much that use case is worth."

That's the core of use case-based sales. Not clever packaging. Not complex credit tiers. Just a clear answer to: what are you solving for them, and how do you price against that?

The companies that figure this out early have an advantage. They're not just selling differently they're building a revenue model that scales with customer value, aligns internal incentives, and doesn't collapse when foundation model costs shift.

"It's going to be more important than ever to really be modeling the right use cases for a business," Simon says. That's where the leverage is. Not in the tokens. In what the tokens accomplish.