4-Step Approach to Solutions Marketing Transformation - VMWare

Recently, VMWare, a software company focused on virtualization and cloud computing, decided to take a more strategic, solutions-oriented approach. This was a transformation for the company, not just marketing, requiring a cohesive solutions strategy. Moving to this new way of going-to-market wouldn't be easy.  The company broke it down into four major steps. 

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Socializing Solutions: 4 Priorities for Solutions Marketing and Sales

Focusing on core priorities for solutions can provide essential guidance for what types of social media initiatives might be appropriate. For many solutions companies, those priorities include: identifying new opportunities, creating compelling offers, strengthening customer connections, and accelerating the sales cycle. If these are your priorities, a social media strategy for solutions might look something like this.

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Solutions Development Competency Requirements

We lay out the 8 competencies that product developers need to have in order to be successful in creating complex solutions offerings.  We’ve laid these differences out in 3 distinct groupings: pre-solutions creation, the solutions creation process itself, and post-solutions creation.

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7 Steps to Differentiating Your Solutions

The following seven-step Differentiator Model provides a sure-fire way to gain a realistic understanding of what your solutions differentiators are, how important they may be to customers, and how best to leverage them in marketing and selling activities.

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4 Steps to Solutions Growth

The Point of View highlights findings from a survey with more than 30 B2B solutions providers on four critical initiatives.

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10 Lessons for Managing a Solutions Council

To look more closely at the critical role that solutions councils can play, we recently interviewed a number of our clients from several industry segments, including information technology, systems integration, and telecommunications. All of these companies have extensive experience in setting up and running solutions councils, so our clients had a great many lessons to share across several dimensions of council management. I outline ten critical lessons below.

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4-Step Model to Building an Effective Customer Advocacy Program

Solutions Marketers have a critical role in transforming your customers into your company’s advocates. Read more about The Case for a Strong Customer Advocacy Program using a 4-Step model.

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8 Critical Success Factors for Protecting and Growing your Best Accounts

After a thorough review of the KAM programs managed by the companies we included in the study, we were able to identify 8 critical success factors that nearly all of them had in common.

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5 Ways to use Social Media for Solutions Marketing

Five ways you can use social media in your solutions marketing, all with the potential for solid return on investment.

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6 Ways to Think like an Editor

From an editorial perspective, we suggest six specific types of content that your customers will indeed want to read, listen to, and view.

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Customer References and Solutions Marketing: 6 Programmatic building blocks for Business Impact

Comparing the best with the rest, six programmatic building blocks are particularly important for the customer reference programs that provide substantial business impact.

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4 Levels of B2B Content Sharing

Creating fresh original content is not the only way to provide value to the customers and others with whom you're trying to connect. Indeed, there are four levels of content sharing that B2B marketers should include in their social media mix.

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4 Steps to strengthening B2B Customer Connections

The CEO imperative makes sense. Big company CEOs are struggling mightily, as the IBM report notes, with "the complexity of operating in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world." Knowing this is a CEO priority, however, should make it at least a bit easier for marketing leaders to push forward with efforts to do what we all know is so important.

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TL in 4D: Four Dimensions for Thought Leadership Success

To make a real impact with customers and create real distinction in the market, thought leadership needs focus, depth,and continuity. At a more fundamental level, companies looking for greater impact with thought leadership need to consider four essential dimensions of program development.

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A 3-Step Model For A Solutions Sales Launch

As the expression goes, “this ain’t rocket science” – but far too often companies don’t have a basic framework that guides them through this process.  We suggest a simple 3-step model:

• Develop a specific sales launch strategy and process
• Create the governance and metrics
• Execute the campaign

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6-Step Approach to a Successful Executive Conversation

Ness Technologies, a global IT professional services company with over 7,000 employees, successfully addressed the challenge of Getting its Clients to Train, Develop and Sell Solutions with a new approach.

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6 Keys to Creating a Playbook that Solutions Salespeople Will Use

Sales support documents and Playbooks have been around since….well, almost since companies have had sales departments!   What we’ve seen, however, is that marketers have felt compelled to match the complexity of the solutions they’re offering today with equally complex – and ultimately confusing – sales Playbooks. 

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Solutions Blocks: Solutions Creation Model

The scope of the project really was to come up with a model which large organizations (mostly technology-based) could apply to create and offer solutions to their customers.  No such standard model yet existed in the academic world.

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4P's are OVER

Compared to the 4 P's, OVER is rooted in the understanding that marketing solutions is quite different than marketing products, and that marketing solutions in a digital, buyer-driven world requires very different thinking, tools, and metrics.

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4 Engines of B2B Marketing Success

The strategy focused on the four marketing engines that we think all B2B firms need to have running smoothly to ensure business success.

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