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 the last two weeks, I’ve talked about how you can help your partners “Productize” your offerings their business as an analogy to building a menu for a restaurant, with a Menu that includes multiple entrees, the recipe for those entrees and the ingredients that make up the entrée.
Today’s post will focus on Step 3: Creating a “Solution Cookbook” – the third and final step in “Productization”.
As we talked about in Step 2, the Solution Enablement Toolkit (SET), is a group of tools that “Productizes” the offering, but to use these assets, they must fit into how a partner markets and sells their solutions that include your products. Figure 1 below shows the overall Productization Process we’ve outlined earlier (PP-PSD) and also shows the underlying processes for how these assets are intended to be used (as outlined in Step 2).
Figure 1: The Overall “Productization” Process with Drill Down on Process
Step 3: Bringing it all together: The “Solution Cookbook”
Without a single place to bring these assets together and a clear process for how the portal is to be used, my experience is that partners will struggle in understanding the GTM and just as importantly your internal staff will create materials the same way they always have – with a lot of product focused materials designed for stand-alone – NOT for helping partners sell solutions that incorporate your products…
The “Solution Cookbook” is shown in Figure 2 below accomplishes both of these goals and servers as the single place for partners to go to Productize their solutions that include your products. Notice how the tab headings match the partner process for consuming your solution materials – Plan, Productize, Promote, Sell and Deliver. When you click into each of these pages, you find a process and the assets to support that process that are shown in Figure 1.Partners can customize this process based on how they do business, but having an starting point for a process helps them build these assets into their solution GTM.
Figure 2: The Solution Cookbook
Let’s summarize where we are in discussing the overall topic of driving revenue for your channels and “Productization”.
- Earlier this year we asked the question “Channel Not Selling Your Products? 3 Questions You Can Ask to Diagnose the Problem”:
- What is the Value Proposition for partners to invest their time in selling your product?
- Is your product and go-to-market program “Channel-Ready”
- What is the Sales Process for selling your product and how does it fit into how your channel partners sell?
- The answer to Question #3 led us to the importance of “Productization” – which is how you help your partners build your products into the solutions they sell for their business.
- But what do you actually do differently to “Productize”? In recent weeks we’ve covered the 3 Steps of Productization:
Step 1: 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”
Step 2: Create a Solution Enablement Toolkit (SET) for each solution that consists of a set of assets that help your resellers incorporate your products the assets they use to promote, sell and deliver their solutions. The combination of the SET asset ingredients and a basic sales process that defines how these assets can be used, represent the “Recipe” for selling and delivering the Solution.
Step 3: 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”.
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