The Solution Evolution, Part II: Implementing Solutions Marketing

Presenting authentic solutions requires significant upfront learning

By Chris Gormley

This is the second article in a four-part series. Reprinted with permission from the Product Strategy Network.

Convinced it will help boost sales and elevate their perceived customer value, more and more companies are transforming themselves from traditional product and service organizations into “solution” providers. In Part I of The Solution Evolution, Chris Gormley explored the essential concepts of a solutions approach. Here, he introduces proven practices and practical actions for navigating the solutions marketing stage of this journey.

As detailed in my previous article, ‘The Solution Evolution Part I,’ transitioning from a traditional product-centered strategy to a solutions approach can be thought of as having three stages:

The first, Solutions Marketing, is largely rhetorical with companies attempting to differentiate themselves through sales messaging. Although largely cosmetic, it is an important step toward recognizing the need to rethink their business as more than just installing or maintaining a product. It also begins to suggest the significance of different market segments. 

The second, Solution Selling, goes considerably deeper. It requires ascertaining each customer’s individual needs through a consultative approach. The goal is to profitably combine the appropriate products and services to solve that customer’s problem. However, it is often marred by soaring costs, difficult quality issues, and unique customer contracts.

The third and most mature stage, Solution Commercialization, streamlines and more clearly defines the solution’s functional roles. Repeating patterns of solutions or segments of solutions which begin to emerge can create the opportunity for more standardized operations and delivery methods. This approach balances the special needs of solution selling against the company’s requirement to maintain profitability, timeliness, and quality. 

If your company is ready to pursue a solutions approach, or if you are in the mist of one already, what questions should you consider? What practices could you put in place? In this series, I discuss practices that worked well for me during each of the three stages of the solution evolution. First, Solutions Marketing:

The Solutions Marketing Stage

The first phase in your transition toward a solutions-based market approach is all about learning You need to ask yourself: “How much do you really know about your customer or industry’s problems, initiatives, or needs?”  

The acid test of your knowledge comes when you bring in seasoned domain experts who are decision makers and users of the product or services you are selling. When you meet them, don’t mention your product, its attributes, or its features. Instead, see if you can capture their attention by describing the real problems and needs that he or she faces each day. Do the domain experts feel you truly understand why their issues are the real issues and why they affect their lives?  

Companies frequently apply a superficial ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to solution marketing – one that shows astute buyers that the company doesn’t really understand their needs, that it oversimplifies their world, or that it glosses over the real issues. At the same time, conveying an authentic understanding of customer issues – which is difficult under any circumstances – can be even harder for companies that operate across wholly different industry vertical markets or global markets. 

For them, developing the appropriate level of understanding requires a significant investment of time, talent, and resources as well as the ability to focus on the needs of multiple vertical markets, global markets, and functional roles. Yet it is precisely this detailed understanding which is at the core of the solutions evolution and reflecting it is critical to your corporate marketing and product management functions – even during the initial Solutions Marketing stage. 

In describing solutions, I tend to focus on ‘industry verticals.’ That’s because solutions often tend to be industry-specific. Even in cross-industry functions like purchasing, the prevailing practices vary. In the oil and gas business, for example, purchasing neither looks nor acts the way it does in the auto industry or in insurance – notwithstanding the fact that on its surface, the function appears to be the same. 

So let me offer a few suggestions: 

Create a “Virtual” Industry Marketing Team – One of the key challenges to establishing expertise grows out of the large number of industries many companies hope to serve. Larger companies often hire industry-specific managers since the amount of business in each of their industry verticals can justify the overhead. However smaller companies may need to establish their expertise and credibility before ever reaching that sort of critical mass. But investing in both corporate marketing and industry marketing may be seen as too great an expense for them. An effective way to get started is to target a limited number of industries and build virtual industry marketing programs around them to help generate enough sales to justify more permanent industry teams. 

However, even a virtual team requires at least one dedicated person to be successful, and this individual will be a critical hire for a successful solutions evolution. In my experience, former management consultants can be highly effective in this role since they have often been exposed to multiple industry verticals, they learn quickly, and they know outside experts who can help them effectively synthesize customer information. This person then creates a ‘virtual’ team of outside domain experts (or inside ones, if they’re available.). That team can provide practical information, advice, and even serve as ‘expert witnesses’ to Sales for later-stage prospect calls – all of it under your company’s name. 

At FreeMarkets, for example, I led a business unit responsible for selling used equipment on behalf of large industrial corporations. But I couldn’t justify hiring experts on certain types of equipment categories. Instead, I identified experts that I would regularly call, or in some cases put on retainer, to provide marketing expertise. In many cases, they would even wear a FreeMarkets name tag to help me close deals and sell equipment. At one point, I reached a large enough business volume in a certain equipment category to justify hiring one of these experts full-time. Without their credibility, I would never have generated the traction we ultimately achieved. 

In another instance, I applied this same approach to software sales which helped me enter the insurance vertical. I did it by calling on individual consultants who held prominent roles in both IT and claims operations. In other cases, I combed through resumes within my own company to find people who had backgrounds in the specialized expertise I needed. Then I put them on the virtual team. In time, our growth allowed me to hire full-time industry managers. What I found is that if it’s done right, a Virtual Industry Marketing Group can form the nucleus around which the other resources required for a solutions approach will eventually crystallize. 

Introduce a “Solutions Web” – Another technique is to build an inventory of ready-made, easy-to-understand content that can be used by Corporate Marketing, Product Management, and Sales. I call this a Solutions Web. The editor-in-chief for the Solutions Web is the Virtual Industry Marketing Team. Their materials need to be ready for use – not just a list of links and articles. A Solutions Web is not only useful to educate internal teams, it is also a forum through which outside experts can provide additional advice and offer improvements. 

Host Online Solutions Forums – Today’s Internet can allow your customers to design their own solutions and provide you with real-time feedback about concepts you are working on for a broader market. One approach is by hosting a blog. This can give your targets valuable content while giving you their feedback in return. A word of caution, however: blogs require constant feeding with daily content of value to your audience. You can provide your own content for your blog, or engage third parties who specialize in creating material for them. Other online forums are also possible. But in either case, the key is to provide something of value that attracts users from whom you can discover, introduce, and test new solution concepts.

Create Solutions Advisory Groups — Many companies already have some sort of advisory group of current customers. You can start out by using these groups or you can build new solutions-oriented customer advisory groups from scratch. Whichever path you follow, encourage their participants to discuss topics among themselves that may have nothing to do with your own company’s products or services, but which may lead them to reveal their most important challenges and what they currently do to solve these problems. At the same time, however, this sort of interaction within a vertical industry group can be difficult because of competition between the different companies represented. So it’s important during these sessions that rather than pushing your company line and selling its products, you keep an open mind and to listen to the underlying issues, needs, and problems that participants are articulating. If done properly, a solution advisory group can become an effective source of solution concepts as well as the initial sounding board for those concepts.

Create Executive Business Cases – A solutions approach requires you to create case studies that focus on real problems facing the industry and how your company solved them, as well as the ultimate results. Make your cases as business-oriented as possible – positioned to where a customer’s senior decision-maker could either present the information without editing or extract it electronically from your document and insert it into his or her own business presentation. This is not like the typical user-oriented level of detail found in most brochures that is so often provided to executives. And, of course, using a name-brand case means everything – particularly if it’s an industry leader. 

Pursue a “Bowling Pin” Approach – Gaining traction with new solutions is very difficult at first because it’s hard to change the way the market perceives your company’s offerings. At the same time, it’s almost impossible to win across all segments and industries at once. So select one or two segments and focus on either the top two players or those companies which are the most respected and imitated in their industry. If you can turn them into references who speak on your behalf, the rest will fall down in order, like bowling pins. Companies who are industry leaders like to be seen as leaders. So they are often eager to speak about their success and, in some cases, to take new entrants under their wing and see them succeed, This approach helps alleviate the burden of having to convince the industry that you, as a supplier are relevant; the leader will do it for you: “If I’m using you, you must be OK.”

Next Up: Part III of IV of the Solutions Evolution Series: Implementing Solutions Selling