Now Is the Time to Transform Your Product Marketing Team into a Solution Marketing Team

B2B customers care little about your product.

What customers care about isn’t you, your company, or the product content you produce.

In the age where customer experience is paramount, an “outward-in” approach is imperative to developing compelling content that fuels revenue growth – and your product marketing content does not and will not do that.

Download our Solutions Marketing Maturity Evaluation Tool to leverage 10 questions to evaluate Market Maturity, rate your company performance based on these questions, and find your company’s weak areas in Market Maturity.

Antiquated product-centric marketing departments create ineffective silos and prevent revenue growth. In contrast, modern solutions-centric marketing departments eliminate silos and provide seamless integration with product and sales teams. The Solution Marketing department drives clarity with the customer problems your organization solves, which comprehensively spans your company’s offerings.

If you are still not convinced a change to Solutions Marketing is required, evaluate the challenges you’ve been attempting to solve, for example:

• Your customers are more focused on cost than value

   

• Your competitors are increasing in market share

   

• You continue to lose prospects and customers to specific competition

   

• Your average sale price (ASP) is not growing at the rate of your industry

   

• Your deal volume is stagnant or declining

   

As a simple example, think about the taxi industry. Lyft, Uber, etc. developed a solution to get from point A to point B efficiently and cost effectively. In the taxi days one had to have cash on hand and didn’t know pricing until the ride was complete. Solving a problem for the customer (Lyft, Uber), over offering a product (Taxi), will consistently create wins for your organization.

Once you’ve committed to fueling revenue growth through Solutions Marketing, it is time to get started.

There are 4 key steps to building your world class solutions marketing capability:

1. Assess the maturity of your Product/Solutions Marketing function

    

2. Identify how the offering set solves the prospect and customer challenges

    

3. Define the target personas and their roles in solving the challenges

    

4. Develop the content that consistently converts prospects into customers

    

Today’s blog covers the first step in deploying the Solution Marketing function. 

Determining your Organization’s Solution Marketing Maturity

Use the Solutions Marketing Maturity Model to gauge where your Solutions Marketing team is starting from. You can use the Solutions Marketing Maturity Evaluation Tool to help with this exercise.

Solution Marketing Maturity Model

The good news? Most organizations (~51%) haven’t evolved past Level 1. The bad news? Every day your competition is making strides towards Solution Marketing. Innovation is occurring in micro-conversations between your competition’s sales and your lost customers. Your prospects expect supporting content throughout all modes and engagement stages, and they don’t expect to read between the lines. It is time to make it easy for them.

If you are Level 1 you have expertise that is focused on a specific domain, product and/or service. Your Product Marketing team focuses on features, function and competitive differences.  Value propositions are understood at the product level, but rarely applied to a customer’s individual drive for acquiring the solution.

If you made it to Level 2, you’ve figured out on a macro-level and a micro-level how to represent the Solution to the customer’s problem, but haven’t connected the dots to drive strategic value. You’ve also only done so conceptually, and are yet to execute.

Your Level 3 organization has implemented the Solution Marketing strategy in tight alignment with the corporate vision for customer solutions. However, you’ve still not made your influence felt outside the Marketing walls and into the Product and Sales functions.

In Level 4 you’ve gone above and beyond by driving seamless interlock with solutions across product and sales teams. There is now a path to innovation because customer feedback permeates the organization and continuously improves solutions. This emerging best practice optimizes customer value and makes your organization the industry leader.

Now that you’ve assessed your organization’s Solutions Marketing maturity, it is time to do something about it. Please subscribe to SBIs blogs today and look out for more content on this and other topics.

Related content:

• Is Your Content Marketing Contributing to Revenue Growth?

   

• How to Get Sales to Use Your Marketing Content

   

• How Marketing Helps Sales Win the Must-win Deals

   

Download our Solutions Marketing Maturity Evaluation Tool to leverage 10 questions to evaluate Market Maturity, rate your company performance based on these questions, and find your company’s weak areas in Market Maturity.

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