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
- Do Your Product Business Units Lead to (Product) “Push” Marketing (and Missed Revenue)? Part 2
- The Three Types of “Solutions”: Which One Do You Use to Market and Sell? Part 3
- Today’s Post – the Solution Blueprint (Part 4)
- What are the Steps to Create Solution Messaging? (Part 5)
Last week I talked about the importance of using solution messaging to connect to your customers and build a strong foundation for your GTM program, in my post, “The Three Types of “Solutions”: Which One Do You Use to Market and Sell?”
But how do you create a strong solution message? A method that I have often used successfully is “The Solution Blueprint”. Before I dive into describing the tool and how to use it, let’s back up and talk about some of the challenges that we typically encounter when we develop joint solution messaging with our alliance partners:
- In most organizations, no person or group has focused responsibility for developing detailed solution messaging with alliances. It is usually the part-time focus of someone , either in alliances, or in product marketing.
o They know their product messaging and they will pull it out and use it whenever they can (unless you offer a viable alternative) …
- Creating alliance messaging requires a clean sheet of paper and a willingness to set aside current stand-alone/product messaging to develop a joint message that speaks to a customer about the joint solution.
o Some part of your core product messaging won’t apply and some parts will be new (for example, if you are messaging a joint VDI security solution, your solution message won’t say “supports physical and virtual” like your product message…)
- IT vendor employees operate “inside the bubble”. They understand the daily acronym conversations with colleagues immediately, but struggle to put aside their perspective and think of things from a customer perspective.
o Try this exercise with your team – ask them to whiteboard what the customer experience is at the intersection of the alliance offerings. The flow would go something like, “data from product X gets shared with Product A from our Alliance partner through an API, and they add diagnostics and display in their user interface. If the Admin wants to set policy, they change X and Y settings and these settings impact what the customer sees in our product UI.” Generally the story once you leave your own companies’ product gets pretty hazy…
o That integrated experience is exactly what customers get with your products today, and this is story that is required to connect to your customer needs (and sell your products)…
So how do you create joint solution messaging that connects with customers? This question gets us back to topic of “The Solution Blueprint…
The “Solution Blueprint” is a visual tool that helps marketing and sales tell a joint solution story to customers. An example of a Solution Blueprint is shown below in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1: The Solution Blueprint (Business Continuity Example)
A Solution Blueprint includes the following key components (reading from left to right on the Solution Blueprint):
- A Customer Challenge that the alliance products work together to solve. Examples of a customer challenge would be Business Continuity, Security for virtual environments, high-availability for SAP, etc…
- A good, better, best Maturity Model for this solution. When we talk to customers, it is helpful to give alternative approaches that address what they have articulated as challenges. By defining multiple solutions, you create a conversation about all the solutions. Even if they decide to buy the “good” solution, your marketing and sales teams have increased the likelihood of upsell to a more robust (and typically expensive) option.
- A Solution Name for each of the solutions in the Blueprint. One of the challenges in developing solutions messaging is language – How do you talk about a combination of products that does not have a name? By default the name becomes “Product A + Product B” which does not convey value to customers and does not link to their challenges. Typically the solution name is something descriptive, like “On-Site Recovery” that can be used as a noun in messaging.
- A Solution Value Proposition for each of the solutions that enables both vendors and their channels to tell the joint story. For the Solution Blueprint, this takes the form of a short statement that combines the challenge and solution like “Assure that applications are available to your customers and employees”.
- These solutions rely on products, but the customer messaging does not lead with product. Products are proof points and support for the solution message. I call this far right column “The Products Behind the Solutions”.
Once you have the Solutions defined, I’ve found that it is relatively easy to work with the joint team to develop strong solution messaging based on the Solution Blueprint and the Solution Value Propositions. Typically the structure is something like:
- Customer Challenge
- How we address the challenge
- Solution Name
- Proof Point / Differentiation
Where Does Product Messaging Fit?
You may be asking yourself, “But what about my Product Messaging? It is key to my differentiation! Where does it fit?“ To answer this question, let’s go back to the Basic Sales Process we discussed in earlier posts, and shown below in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Leveraging the Solution Blueprint in ‘the Sales Process
Lessons Learned
- To connect to customers in the early stages of the sales cycle, we need to use solution messaging – which is “Why” our offering is relevant to customers. This is where the Solution Blueprint and messaging is used.
- Once the opportunity is qualified, the customer will need to validate the solution, compare alternatives and get pricing – all of which require them to understand your “product” and this is where your product materials are used
Another important benefit of using Solutions Messaging early in the sales cycle is that it allows generalist sales reps to begin a customer conversation and qualify interest – BEFORE bringing in more specialized (and expensive) staff to answer more specific product and technical questions or to create a specific Bill of Materials. A Reseller does not want their lead architect to be brought into customer calls where the opportunity has not been qualified. The Solution Blueprint approach enables generalist sales Reps to qualify opportunities and do initial positioning of the solution by themselves, and then bring in specialized resources to help once the opportunity has been qualified.
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