This document provides an overview of solution marketing best practices as presented by Steve Robins. It discusses defining complete solutions to customer problems, developing solution strategies that include products, services, and partners, educating customers on problems and solutions, articulating the value and ROI of solutions, and enabling access to solutions through various channels. The presentation includes examples of companies like Intuit, HubSpot, Microsoft SharePoint, and Amazon Kindle that demonstrate effective solution marketing approaches.
To get started… All too often we marketers think that our product or technology is THE answer to the customer’s problem. But it’s not. In fact, the customer needs much more than just a single product to solve their business problem.
Customers also need to take into account… The people involved – how will they use this? The business processes involved Information …and the services and integration involved to plan, build and connect the system together. Taken together, this is a solution – as opposed to just a product. Today, more and more top software companies are marketing not just products, but broader solutions as well.
Customers also need to take into account… The people involved – how will they use this? The business processes involved Information …and the services and integration involved to plan, build and connect the system together. Taken together, this is a solution – as opposed to just a product. Today, more and more top software companies are marketing not just products, but broader solutions as well.
So here’s a definition… Solution marketing is The process of defining, educating, and providing access to complete and integrated solutions that deliver customer value by helping customers to solve their problems.
You’re probably familiar with the 4 P’s of marketing – product, promotion, price and place. Well, when you work with solutions, you need to take a different approach to marketing. I call it SEVA and it’s based on work done by professors Chekitan Dev and Don Schultz several years back. The four key steps of solution marketing are solution, education, value and access. The first step is understanding the customer problem and defining the solution that solves the problem. Next step: educating the market about the problem and your solution, and engaging with prospective customers. The next element involves looking at the value provided by the solution. Value equals the customer benefit less the total cost of the solution. And finally, access – the ability for customers to purchase and use the solution successfully in the way that works best for them.
We’ll take a look at selected best practices for each element of SEVA: Solution We’ll see how Intuit’s solution approach knocked out a major competitor We’ll take a look at PowerAdvocate’s marriage of data and software Education We’ll look at HubSpot, which focuses almost exclusively on education rather than interruptive promotion. We’ll look at IBM’s social media policies to see how social media plays into education. Value We’ll look at the value of SAP and Oracle support – some very interesting lessons here And we’ll see one of the reasons for Microsoft SharePoint’s success against it’s mainline competitors Access Finally, we’ll take a look at the ways that Amazon, Comcast and Salesforce enable broad access to their solutions.
The agenda. I’ll dig deeper into solution marketing, using the case studies to illuminate each of the key elements of solution marketing – solution – education – value – access Then we’ll conclude with Q+A and discussion.