In my recent series “How Tech Vendor Messages Can Create Customer “Pull” and Revenue, we’ve talked about why tech vendor messaging often do not connect to customers (and miss revenue opportunities)
- Does Your Messaging Work in the “Cocoon”, But Fall Flat with Customers?
- How to Build the “Hook” into Your Messaging to Create “Pull” and Accelerate Revenue
In today’s post, I will focus on how to leverage the lessons from these posts to create strong “pull” messaging for your products that help you drive revenue. To do this, we’ll pull together principles from the first 2 posts and then do a specific case study that illustrates how you can create customer “pull” for your products (and how this “out of the box” approach is different than what most technology companies usually do in their messaging).
As shown below in Figure 1, the “Hook” that connects your product message to you customers is your thought leadership message that connects your vision to the challenges that your customers face every day (as opposed to your product features, which often do not link clearly to customer challenges. Think of this as a right-to-left process, starting at the customer.
Figure 1: Messaging to “Fill the Gap”
So how do you develop this type of messaging? Figure 2 below shows an overall architecture of building this message.
Figure 2: Core Message Architecture
Let’s discuss each of these Steps in the defining your message in detail:
Step 0 –Market Vision
What I’ve found is companies that are able to communicate a compelling vision for the future, are able to sell their products more successfully. Why is that? Many vendors tend to think of an individual order as a “transaction”. The sales team gets paid and everyone at the vendor is happy – but this perspective understates the customer perspective. Generally they buy not just to fulfill a set of needs, but to support a broader strategy.
For example, if the vendor is selling converged infrastructure like Vblock from VCE or FlexPod from NetApp/Cisco, they are buying not just because they have a hardware refresh or end of a maintanenace cycle (in these cases they would likely just replace/upgrade the hardware they have), but because they have a vision that requires a new product.
This is a critical point – to sell a product that supports a new customer strategy, a vendor and their sales team must articulate both the product capabilities AND the vision for where customers are going (that requires the new product.
This seems obvious – except that when I think about my experiences, I don’t see “both” happening very often. What I’ve seen is that often:
- Vendor marketing articulates a vision (often very hazy) for the future
- Vendor sales positions the features and capability of the product
- But the link between the Vision and the Product is often very, very hazy (or non-existent?)
Step 1 – Customer Value Proposition
Summarizes the customer current situation and how the vendor can create a better world for the customer, linked to the Solution messages as shown in Step 2 (see Table 1 example)
Step 2 – Solution Messages and Differentiators
As I talked about in my recent post and shown in Figure 3 below, when vendors get the messaging fork in the road, they often choose to talk about their product – instead of how they can help customers….
Figure 3: The Messaging “Fork in the Road”
So how do you connect your solution and product messages to customer problems? That is where the Solution Blueprint methodology comes in that I’ve talked about in a number of my posts. A key benefit of this approach – that generalist sales reps and channel can qualify and position opportunities, without needed specialists – and once they qualify that it is a real opportunity, you can bring in your specialists to help validate and close the deal.
Figure 4: The Solution Blueprint: A Visual Message that Speaks to Customer Needs
Drill-Down Solution Messaging
For each of the four solutions, you can then provide more detail and proof on specifically “HOW” you solve the customer problem (not what your product does) in the outline below:
- Solution 1, 2, etc..
- Customer Problem 1, 2, etc…
- How you solve this problem 1,2, etc..
- The Products behind the solutions – transition to products as a proof point
- Call to Action
Table 1: Example Business Continuity Message – Connecting with Customers
(Script for 1-Minute Video)
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