Is Your Organization Missing Revenue by Marketing and Selling Inside the “Product Box” (Part 3 of 5)

AKA Why Do Companies Struggle to Build the ATM Bridge?  The Product Box (Part 3 of 5)

• Part 1: The Four “Boxes”
• Part 2: Are You Executing Out of the Box?  A Checklist
• Part 3: The Product Box
• Part 4: The Ownership and Task Boxes
• Part 5: The Solution-Branding Box

Part 3: The Product Box

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about the “Four Boxes” that prevent companies from successfully aligning their alliances and products to drive revenue in their sales channels.  These Boxes are shown in Figure 1 and over the next few weeks, I’ll dive into each of these Boxes in more detail.  In today’s post, let’s drill into the first of these boxes, “The Product Box”.

Figure 1: The Four Boxes (The Product Box) 

Figure 2 illustrates how the Product Box works.  Companies want to sell their products, but customers want to buy a solution to their problem, and that “solution” often includes multiple products, and services (such as architecture, implementation and support) to make it work.

 

Figure 2: The Product Box

My “aha moment” on this came a few years ago.  I was attending a reseller presentation from a leading backup vendor, and they presented a slide on their DR Solution. I scoffed to myself, ”Ha! That slide is incomplete! A DR solution needs to include an approach to server, storage and replication, and should be on a virtualized platform.  They are selling a product, not a solution.”  Then I recalled seeing slidestitled “DR Solution”, from server, storage and virtualization vendors, and they made no mention of each other as part of the solution.  And none of them really talked about the services that would be needed to stand up this solution.  It seemed like a giant “shell game” where each vendor only talks about the piece of the solution that they can sell a customer. Who knits all this together?  Of course the answer is “Resellers”, but the newer and more complex the solution, the fewer resellers who can pull it off (and that means less product sold…).

The Product Box is perhaps the most familiar of the Four Boxes.  We in the tech industry have often heard that we should sell solutions and we are now careful not to “push product”.  If we get the feeling we are giving a product pitch, we recover by inserting the word “solution” after the product name.   I recently received an email from a major virtualization vendor ,“10 Points You Should Know about [Product X] Disaster Recover Solution…” I thought to myself, “But that product is only a part of the “solution!”  We’ve all seen it and we’ve all done it.

But why does it really matter?  It boils down to effectively communicating value to the customer – and that creates sales opportunities.  Let’s take an example,  If you had just one minute to get your target customer’s attention, which approach would you take to engage a target customer?

• Option A: Position how you can help solve a problem that the customer has or may have?
• Option B: Tell the customer the capabilities of your product? (and let them figure out how they could use those capabilities to solve their problems)

We all see that Option A is a better approach.  It tells the customer “WHY” they should care, rather than “WHAT” it is that you are selling.  So why do we often do Option B instead? … (and fall prey to the Product Box).  Tough question – and that is a topic for another day.

Next week, in Part 4 of this series, I’ll talk more about the “Ownership Box and the “Task Box”.  I welcome any comments below — And make sure you subscribe to our blog (and tell your friends), so you can follow this discussion and have your say.

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