Part of a Series: Helping Your Channel Sell Solutions (So They Can Sell More of Your Products…)

• What 3 Questions Indicate Whether You Need to Sell “Solutions”? (and when does selling “Product” work better?…) (Part 1)
• Today’s Post – Part 2
• What 3 Questions Indicate Whether You Need to Sell “Solutions”? (and when does selling “Product” work better?…)  Part 3
• The Solution Blueprint: A Visual Tool for Connecting with Your Customers (and accelerating product revenue…) (Part 4)
• What are the Steps to Create Solution Messaging? (Part 5)

We’ve all heard the term “Pull” marketing – and it’s something we know is beneficial and accelerates revenue. The option of “Pushing” doesn’t sound attractive – we associate a “pusher” with selling drugs or being a pushy used car salesman, But it can also apply to selling technology.  “Pushing” is exactly what technology marketers and sellers do when they push their product message out to a (sometimes) targeted audience, looking for interest.  And that message often does not include much information on “WHY” a prospect should be interested, but is chock full of what the “WHAT” the product does (and plenty of acronyms).

Figure 1 illustrates Push vs. Pull, according to Wikipedia¹:

• In “Push” marketing and selling, a product features are broadcast to customers in an effort to find interested customers.   My experience is that in “Push” marketing, the conversation is about the vendor.  The vendors’ product is the most scalable, flash-enabled, automated, eco-friendly, industry-standard, virtualized, cloud-ready, scale-up, windows-compatible, asynchronous, octo-core, THING on the earth. A lot of features and adjectives, but it may not be clear exactly why you need this THING…
• In “Pull” marketing and selling, the conversation is focused on an expressed customer need.  My experience is that in “Pull” marketing, the conversation is about the customer, and marketing and sales frame products in terms of how they address customer problems.

Figure 1: Technology Push vs. Market Pull 

1-Source: Wikipedia Push-Pull Strategy, Feb 25, 2014

In previous posts such as “Building a Bridge to Drive Revenue From Your Alliances and Channels (Part 2 of 2)”, I’ve talked about what it takes to market and sell technology products in terms of” Building a Bridge” between a vendor’s products, and their target customers.  Figure 2 depicts this dynamic in terms of “Push vs. “Pull” Marketing in terms of the GTM Bridge.  In “Pull” marketing, customer needs connect back to a vendor’s product and there is a pathway for successful sales.   But in “Push” marketing, a vendor pushes their product message without connecting to customer needs, and that does not build a pathway for revenue.

Figure 2: Building a Bridge and “Push” vs. “Pull” Marketing

One reason is the “Product Box” – 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.   That is just not the way companies usually talk about their products.)  Another cause is the “Solution-Branding Box” – You build sales tools, training and campaigns around your products.  But your channel needs materials on the solution (which includes other products, plus services, that they can insert into their sales process…)

But the third major reason this occurs is the way large technology companies are organized – in particular, “Push” marketing often results from dynamics created by Product Business Units!  Product BUs make a ton of sense at some level – they align resources to opportunities, they give leaders the control of allocating resources and make them accountable for results.  So what’s not to like?  The issue is that over time, Product BUs tend to drive an internally-focused corporate culture (particularly if there is a shared sales force that sells across different markets and BUs).  To get sales to spend time selling their product, they have to convince sales (i.e. “sell them”) that the product meets their needs (profitable and easy to sell). Over time, a culture develops where for many in the organization – “Sales is the Customer”.   The sales team is clearly a very critical input on what customers need, but their perspective and incentives are not necessarily aligned with what customers want.  When organizations develop a “Push” culture, it can miss customer feedback and take a long time before the it recognizes the need to change in response to customer changing needs – putting revenue and even survival at risk.

From my experience and talking to colleagues in the technology industry, I think it is fair to say that the dynamics created by Product BUs has contributed to stagnation of large tech companies like Sun, Cisco, HP, Symantec, and many others.  In all of these cases, at least some parts of the organization lost touch with what the customer wanted and began to believe that customers would buy whatever the company wanted to sell (often their proprietary technology stack).  That strategy may have worked for a while, but ultimately customers need solutions to their problems, more than they need any single vendor.

So how can companies address this problem?  A key element of success in creating a “Pull” marketing and sales approach across the organization that focuses on SOLUTIONS that address customer problems.  As we’ve discussed before – solutions meet a customer business need and often include products from multiple vendors, as well as professional services. To accomplish this culture shift, organizations need to “Climb Out of the Box”, and pursue A New Approach For Driving Revenue with their Alliances and Channel.

A list of some of these changes was included in my post, “Are You Executing Out of the Box – A Checklist” – we will talk more about this topic in future posts.  I welcome any comments below — And make sure you “Follow” our blog (look for the “Follow” link on the upper left) and have your say.