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