Solutions Marketing: Back to the Basics - What is the Definition of a Solution?

I had two conversations with senior level marketers at large B2B technology companies last week about their solutions businesses.  In both conversations, we realized that we had different views and definitions for the term “solution”.   In both situations, it wasn’t just a matter of semantics – a lack of a common definition of what we were talking about led to different opinions of how solutions should be developed and marketed.

Why a Common Definition is Important

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Solutions Success Story: HP backs solutions rhetoric with organization change and investment

Everyone talks about "solutions" these days but few seem to invest in the changes necessary to move beyond the rhetoric. For example, truly developing, marketing, and selling integrated B2B solutions typically requires both a strong focus from the top down and a new alignment from the bottom up.

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Solutions Success Story: How TELUS helped its sales force succeed in selling solutions

Here's a common scenario: A company spends significant time and energy create a new set of solutions for a specific market segment. A cross-business unit board agrees to support the new initiative and asks Marketing to put together a go-to-market plan for the new solutions. The marketing team rolls out the new program, including wonderful new collateral for the sales force. They brief the sales force on the new solutions and publicly launch their offerings with great fanfare. And then...nothing. The sales force does what it does best, which is selling what it is used to selling and can explain quickly and easily, which is not the new solutions. Marketing is left wondering what's wrong with the sales force.

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Solutions marketing and ABM: Recommendations for making them work well together

For companies that are committed to building and selling solutions, understanding how to adapt marketing tools and activities to support the more complex and higher value solutions offerings is critical.  One area of B2B marketing where solutions go-to-market principles need to be applied is account planning and management.  The methodology that a lot of our clients have used very successfully is often referred to as Account-Based Marketing (ABM).  ABM is perfectly tailored to a customer-centric solutions model.  It is generally defined as treating individual accounts as a market in their own right.  The implications of this definition is that a solutions company applies its sales and marketing resources to understanding a key account’s business challenges,  which often then results in adapting existing assets and resources to resolve the account’s most pressing problems. 

The Three Main Phases of an ABM Program

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Solutions Success Story: How VMware shifted its go to market strategy to a solutions focus

VMware, a software company focused on virtualization and cloud computing, recently faced a classic dilemma that many companies, especially technology-based companies, have encountered. The business model was to develop and sell software packages. These packages were created and sold as products -- traditional product development processes were applied, the portfolio was comprised of 60+ separate products that were sold separately, and the marketing programs and messages were designed to support each of the product categories independently.  The reason for this approach can be traced back to its historic roots -- it started out as a single-product company.  Through new technology developments, plus a succession of acquisitions, the company quickly expanded its portfolio with no shift in its go-to-market or sales strategy.  In effect, VMware was doing what many software companies have always done -- focused on developing a broad portfolio of differentiated products, and then incenting the sales force to go out and sell licenses for all of them.

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B2B marketing as media: Six ways to think like an editor

B2B marketers in great numbers have jumped on the content marketing bandwagon and embraced the idea that marketing needs to be more like media. We have to focus on providing "readers" and "viewers" (i.e., customers, prospects, and other stakeholders) with interesting and useful material on a regular basis as the starting point for creating and sustaining interest in our products and solutions.

The big problem, of course, is actually doing it: consistently producing material that our hoped-for audiences actually care about enough to read, listen, view, and, ideally, comment upon and share more widely.

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Using account-based marketing to create and market new solutions

B2B companies committed to selling high value solutions often struggle where the rubber meets the road: the individual customer or prospect. Their websites highlight "solutions" and marketers pump out collateral that talks about their customers' business problem, but they have a much tougher time persuading specific customers that they are truly focused on delivering tailored solutions for their unique situations and challenges. The unfortunate reality is that generic "solutions" often need a fair degree of customization if they are going to deliver substantial business value to different customers even in the same industries.

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Customer references and solutions marketing: Building blocks for business impact

B2B marketers focused on high value solutions know that customer evidence is like gold. Great products may sell themselves based on features or price. But when you're asking business buyers to invest serious money in a complex solution, typically involving a customized mix of products and services, they need to know you've done it before and that other customers have derived real business benefits.

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Solutions Marketing: The four P's are OVER

Virtually every marketing student on the planet can recite the 4 P’s: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Since the early 1960's when Harvard Business School professor Neil Borden first described them as key elements of the marketing mix, the 4 P's have held their ground as the foundational pillars of 50 years of marketing planning.

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The continuing rise of Account-Based Marketing: Four keys to success

Over the last 10 years, more and more B2B firms have invested in account-based marketing: treating individual accounts as "markets" and devising focused campaigns just for them.

Back when my partners and I were developing some of the early methodology for account-based marketing in the early 2000s at ITSMA, it was a tough sell.

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