3 Major Steps In The Solution Business

3 Major Steps In The Solution Business

Yes, it’s only 3 Major Steps. Enterprises gradually shift their focus to solutions or moves away from products to solutions especially when those products get commoditized or the product margins are declining, as you know. The major shift actually happens in the process we develop, go to market and convince the target audiences. The go-to-market strategy thus becomes pivotal in conceptualizing and executing the whole solution piece. There are multiple steps in the go-to-market strategy. However, we identified 3 major steps, without which one cannot move from product to solution. They are as follows:

1.   Step # 1: Understand Customer Pain Points and Improvement Areas. Every organization has some pain points. The examples could be “high utility cost”, “weak business opportunity management”, “me-too products”, “rising operational costs”, “lesser-than-expected revenue growth”, “declining or flat profitability”, “flat market participation” and the likes.  Your current product may be able to partially address one or couple of customer pain points, but not fully. There are some companies who may not have very salient pain points, but have identified some improvement areas which could take the customer organization ahead of competition. These (pain points &/or improvement areas) could be the potential opportunities to develop a suitable solution putting together the missing pieces, if that strategically fits to the enterprise’s vision, mission & values.

2.  Step # 2: Customer Pain-to-Solution Process. This process starts with developing the solution and ends with delivering it. Developing a solution starts with thorough understanding of the customer pain points. A gap analysis needs to be done to understand the missing pieces of the puzzle. Once you identify the missing pieces, you need to evaluate whether we will develop them in-house or we intend to out-source them. A cost-benefit analysis will possibly help us making the right decision (whatever makes sense for your enterprise). Put them together. Run a proof-of-concept and finalize the solution. Parallelly, we need to figure out how we take this solution to the market. Environment scan is needed to assess how big could be the market, how intense those pain points are, will customer really be ready to pay to get rid of such problem/s, who else are in this or very close to this, what are their offerings, how they position themselves, how they go to market, what are their solution limitations, can we plug them (if needed) in our solution, what could be our differentiators, what value/s customer will get out of those differentiators etc. etc.

3.   Step # 3:  Be a Trusted Adviser. This is a very sensitive step, involving customer-facing interactions. One of the things that successful solution selling enterprises do is to elevate the conversation level to “C” level of customer organization. The dialogue needs to open with customer’s concerns in mind and how can you solve at least one or some of their concerns or challenges. In a customer organization a department or functional head may not be able to support, considering his / her limited domain of control. However, for a cross-functional solution, the “C” level person can quickly see the value of the solution and can help getting a decision made. Moreover, the proposed solution will have greater scope & scale at the enterprise level rather than at functional or departmental level. That’s the reason why elevation of conversation is a must-do approach. During the discussion you need to have adequate situational fluency. Ideally, there should not be any vacuum of voice, especially when you are suggesting solutions which appropriately address their pain points.  The customer organization should see you as their trusted adviser rather than a just a sales person. When you solve somebody’s problem/s he tends to accept you more as an adviser rather than anything else, because, you are trying to convert their pain points to comfort points.

This is very different from pushing product. Because, if you look at it clinically, product is an “inside out” approach, while solution is an “outside in” one. Finally, a solution configurator needs to be designed for the customers to play with it inputting their data (related to their pain points) to get a configured solution on-line real time. It’s customized!! Wow!!

You can follow me on twitter: @samikar

Acknowledgement for Solution Selling: http://www.spisales.com/solution_selling.aspx

You can follow me on twitter: @samikar 
You may visit the blog post on "Business Intelligence": http://consult2win.blogspot.com/