  We investigate inflationary scenarios driven by a class of potentials which
are similar in form to those that arise in certain minimal supersymmetric
extensions of the standard model. We find that these potentials allow a brief
period of departure from inflation sandwiched between two stages of slow roll
inflation. We show that such a background behavior leads to a step like feature
in the scalar power spectrum. We set the scales such that the drop in the power
spectrum occurs at a length scale that corresponds to the Hubble radius
today--a feature that seems necessary to explain the lower power observed in
the quadrupole moment of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies. We
perform a Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis to determine the values of the
model parameters that provide the best fit to the recent WMAP 5-year data for
the CMB angular power spectrum. We find that an inflationary spectrum with a
suppression of power at large scales that we obtain leads to a much better fit
(with just one extra parameter, $\chi_{\rm eff}^{2}$ improves by 6.62) of the
observed data when compared to the best fit reference $\Lambda$CDM model with a
featureless, power law, primordial spectrum.
