Is the “Solution-Branding Box” Causing You to Miss Revenue (and Wasting 50% of Your “Enablement” Resources?) (Part 5 of 5)

AKA “Why do Companies Struggle to Build the Alliance GTM Bridge? “  The Solution-Branding Box (Part 5 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

For the last month or so, I’ve been talking about the “The Four Boxes” that prevent companies from driving revenue from their alliances and channels. Today I’ll talk about the last of these barriers, The “Solution-Branding Box”.

Figure 1 below depicts the customer perspective when they are considering buying technology products.  Picture the scenario – the customer is on the phone/sitting in a room, they are talking to your Rep or one of your channel partners and they are asking themselves a simple question, “Does this solve my problem?”

Figure 1: The Customer Perspective

 

Now think about how you market and sell to prospective customers – are you addressing this perspective?

• Do you market and sell your offerings in terms of the value that they provide to customers?
• Can customers easily recognize that value when they see your demand generation campaigns?
• Does your message create “pull” from customers so that they want to know more?
• Does your sales elevator pitch start at the value you provide to customers?
• Or do you “Push” your message to them in language like “industry most robust/scalable/fastest/juiciest” XYZ from the leading vendor in the (fill in your favorite cryptic niche) market.

The Solution Branding Box is depicted in Figure 2, and is really a sales and marketing problem that has two separate but related misunderstandings on how to create “pull” from customers (and sell more products).

• The first challenge is that very few technology products represent a “whole product”, or Solution by themselves.  As we discussed in the “Product Box” post, a solution typically consists of products from multiple vendors and often includes services to design or implement the solution.
• The second challenge is that for many companies in the technology industry, channel partners are an integral part of the sales process, and this is particularly true outside of large enterprise customers.  I’ve seen presentations over the years at industry conferences from VMware, Cisco, HP and others where they state that the channel is engaged in 80-85%+ of their revenue.  When channel partners talk to customers, they talk in terms of solutions that maximize the value that they provide to the customer.  In many cases the solutions they are selling are “reseller branded” (e.g. a reseller would position an “ACME Solutions DR Deluxe” solution that could include VMware, HP servers, HP/LeftHand storage, Riverbed WAN optimization and Symantec Backup and Recovery, and the reseller’s professional services offerings (which is where they generate most of their gross profit).

Figure 2: The Solution-Branding Box

So what are the implications of the Solution-Branding Box?

The biggest implication is lost revenue.  If a reseller is engaged with customers talking about solutions that incorporate your products, they better have good information on how your products are differentiated in those solutions.  For example, if your products optimize storage in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments but all your sales training and tools focus on storage performance metrics targeted toward the storage administrator, you’ve got a problem.  The person architecting the VDI solution will be more interested in how you impact the user experience and cost for the VDI solution.  If you don’t make that clear, some channel partners will figure it out for themselves – but would you bet your meeting your wall street revenue expectations, or getting your next round of VC funding on that happening (I did not think so)?

The other major implication is wasted resources. Look at Figure 2 and think about the sales training and tools that your company produces and is used with your channel.  Are most of your sales training, tools, demand generation campaigns and value propositions “product centered” like the left side of the diagram, or are they “solution-centered” like the middle of the diagram? My experience is that most technology vendors have at least 10X more product-centered materials than solution-centered materials.  Even in a solution sale, some product information is critical (more on this in a future post).  But what if you could cut 50% of the material you are producing today that your channel cannot use, and use these resources to drive more revenue?…  That is the opportunity available if you can overcome the “Solution-Branding Box”.

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