Part of a Series: The Recipe for “Productization”
- 3 “Productization” Steps to Help your Channel Sell More of Your Product
- Step 1 – Define the “Solution Menu” Partners Can Sell to Drive Product Sales
- Step 2 – Create a Solution Enablement Toolkit (SET) as the “Recipe” for Marketing, Sales and Delivery
- Step 3 – Use a “Solution Cookbook” Portal to Communicate the “Solutions Menu” and the “Recipe” to Partners
In last weeks’ post, I discussed the 3 steps to “Productizing” your offerings within your partners’ business, and focused on the overall approach and the details of Step 1: Defining Solutions that Partners Sell that incorporate your products. In this week’s post, I will talk more about Step 2 in this process – Creating a Solution Enablement Toolkit (SET).
The 3-Step Process for “Productization”:
- Define the solution(s) that your solution-focused resellers sell that incorporate your products. These solutions are the “Appetizers, Entrees and Desserts” that you offer on your “Solution Menu”
- Create a Solution Enablement Toolkit (SET) for each solution
- Promote these assets to your solution-focused partners as part of GTM program to sell and deliver the Solution – including both Phase 1: Planning and Productization and Phase 2: GTM Execution. The SET and the underlying process are supported in a partner-facing portal we the “Solution Cookbook”.
Step 2: Create the Solution Enablement Toolkit (SET) mapped to your sales process
One of the most common complaints from resellers about vendor materials is that it is often not clear 1) what assets exist to support sales and delivery and 2) how the assets that they find are intended to be used. Vendor assets are sometimes written as “radio broadcasts” that bombard the audience with messages on features– but do not connect to the problems that customers live with every day.
To create the “Recipe” for the Solution, you need to think through:
- What the basic marketing and sales process will be and
- What assets you will produce to sell the particular solution to that particular audience.
When you go through that process, you will likely end up with a process and an asset list along the lines of Figures 1 supporting a productization process shown in Figures 2 – 4 below. Note that these steps must happen together – you can’t develop assets without understanding how they will be used and you cannot develop a process for how assets will be used unless you have talked to your resellers on how they incorporate your products into their solutions.
Figure 1: The Solution Enablement Toolkit (SET)
The Solution Enablement Toolkit is a group of tools that when combined “PRODUCTIZE” the Solution, accelerating a partners ability to bring it to market.
Some comments on the assets for the SET outlined above:
- What I’ve found is that the first two rows of “solution” assets tend to be needed early in the sales cycle – to help generalist salespeople qualify and position. When “solution” assets don’t exist, marketing and sales try to position product features (and we’ve all seen how well that works…)
- The Columns divide the assets into sales and marketing tools, SE/Technical tools and Consultant tools, to make sure the assets are appropriate for the type of person that would use them.
- The three Rows differentiate the audience for the asset. The first row is for enablement assets that are used by the partner. The second row is customer-facing solution assets, and the third row is (mostly existing) product assets that are suitable for all the audiences.
- Note that for the customer-facing assets in the 2nd row, the partner needs to create their own partner-branded assets (to promote their Solution) – and you can dramatically accelerate this process by providing the template information for them to use. The material that you provide is unformatted text (not a vendor-branded template with a space for a partner logo)…
- The bottom row includes the “Product” assets that typically talk about features of the product and deeper performance information that is critical to customers later in the sales cycle, at the validation stage.
Figure 2: The “Productization” Process (PP-PSD)
Figure 3: The Underlying Process for Phase 1 (Plan and Productize)
Figure 4: The Underlying Process for Phase 2: “Sell”
A critical point is that partners have different GTM models and approaches to selling their solutions, so the processes shown in Figure 2 Figure 3 that you define for the the SET will be used is rarely exactly what a particular partner is doing. However, by building your assets to support a specific process, you enable partners to take these assets and leverage them in their process, If you don’t provide a map to how the assets are intended to be used, partners will have to sort through every asset to determine what is useful to them, and they will struggle and give up. Which is exactly what happens today…
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