The Journey from Offerings to Solutions

The Journey from Offerings to Solutions

Many IT services companies have made or are making fundamental changes in their organizations to truly embrace solutions. Moving to solutions requires a strong emphasis on gaining detailed insights into market segments and individual clients’ (and prospects’) business challenges, business processes, and buying dynamics to support the development of compelling value propositions for your solutions. Once a company makes the decision to provide solutions to their customers, they must create a different go to market strategy which reflects that perspective.

An effective go to market strategy leverages a combination of sales and marketing tactics. To gain the most value, marketing promotion should focus on the “solutions” level, with sales pulling the conversation through to individual offers as part of the sales cycle. In order for the go to market strategy for solutions to be universally understood within the organization, it is important to create a common taxonomy and definitions for solutions.

Solution Taxonomy is a hierarchical representation of solutions providing consistent nomenclature which enables the integration of offerings into solutions. A Solution Taxonomy includes Solutions, Offering Suites, and Offerings. The Solutions offer a higher value proposition to clients and leverage many offers from an ecosystem of an internal portfolio of offerings which are augmented by external partners and capabilities.

The following is an example of a solution taxonomy that can be used to structure a go to market approach.

Offerings are assembled into offering suites and then horizontal and vertical solutions where value to the customer and differentiation are increased as you move up the solution stack. An organization should create standard, discrete offerings, as well as standard solutions that can be configured to order with predetermined configurable options. These standard offerings will be created based on market-driven requirements to support targeted market segments.

There will still be an opportunity to provide non-standard offerings at the discretion of the offerings and sales organization. There will certainly be circumstances when a non-standard offering or component of a solution can be considered and then built to order. This customer-specific solution can provide a unique and differentiated capability that sets the customer apart from their competitors.

Solution assembly is essential to meeting broad market demands, however a company shouldn't abandon their offering mix for a pure solution approach. Assemble offerings into differentiated solutions that provide something that your competitors can’t or haven’t thought of. Build or use capability from either inside your organization or outside to create an ecosystem of partners and technologies which create new value chains and new revenue models for you and your customers.

 

Ganesh Swaminathan

AI Catalyst with Minds Wide Open

9 年

Well said.

Diana Billingham

Executive Partner at Gartner

9 年

A great articulation of the value a service provider should provide to clients which all too often is missed not thought through

Neil Gatenby

Pragmatic Digital Transformation | Strategy to Execution | Program and Project Delivery Mentor | Organisational Change Management | Business Case Realisation | ERP and System Implementation | Tech & Digital Roadmap

9 年

Fantastic!!! Makes perfect sense... from a customer's perspective, I engage a service provider to solve a problem. If the service provider can't translate what and how they offer into something that solves my problem, then i'm not going to do business with them... From a services provider perspective, it is imperative that we articulate well how we stitch together the various components of what we offer to help solve the problem. Really like the way you've described this here!!!

Very well articulated / described. The impact of what you describe will be much bigger than most service providers will realize,

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Henry Singer

Information Technology Leader | Enterprise Architect | Management Consultant | Supply Chain Management Professional

9 年

Thanks for sharing.

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