Why Most Solution Messaging Initiatives Fail

Many organizations try to improve the way that they communicate the value of their solutions to customers, but few are fully successful.  The most important reason that solution-centric messaging initiatives fail is the reason!

No, this isn’t a riddle — but unfortunately, it is a mystery that few marketing organizations have been able to solve.

Effective solution centric messaging needs to clearly answer four critical customer questions:

1. What problem or pain does your solution solve?
2. How well do you understand that problem?
3. How does your solution actually solve that problem?
4. How does your solution solve it cheaper, faster, or better than your competition?
5. What is the bottom line business impact and value of your solution?

Most marketing organizations do a pretty good job at answering question number 1. Unfortunately, few have any processes in place to create, maintain, and continuously improve the messages that answer questions 2 through 5. So…everybody ends up just winging it.

This is because most product marketers haven’t clearly and explicitly defined the key underlying reasons for the customer’s problem. As a result, they continue to focus on describing the features and capabilities of their products throughout their collateral and sales tools and rarely ever focus on how those features and capabilities actually solve the problem.

This is what a formal problem-solution mapping process is all about. It’s a process where product marketing teams explicitly define the underlying reasons for each customer problem and then link the key capabilities of their solutions those to the underlying reasons. Once this mapping is complete it creates a framework for answering all five critical customer questions and, more importantly, sharing and institutionalizing this knowledge throughout the entire marketing and sales organization.

Formalized problem-solution maps help establish a marketing and sales culture where discussing the customer’s pains and reasons in collateral and selling conversations is as natural as a discussing products and features. This creates sustainable competitive advantage and it’s what differentiates a solution centric organization from a product centric organization.

The pharmaceutical industry is starting to inject the pain-reason model into more and more of its advertizing because it demonstrates an understanding of the customer’s pain, it increases the credibility of the company and the solution, and it just plain works.

So, if you’re serious about supporting a solution centric sales process, you need to follow the lead from these drug companies and embrace the pain-reason model as theSo, if you’re serious about supporting a solution centric sales process, you need to follow the lead from these drug companies and embrace the pain-reason model as the foundation of your company’s positioning and messaging strategy. The B-to-B marketing organizations who fail to embrace solution messaging principles and delay the implementation of a formal and visible problem solution mapping process will become less & less relevant to the sales process.

  

Comments

[Steve Robins]

Interesting post Bob. I've been marketing software solutions for over ten years and I completely agree that many product marketers fail to answer the five customer questions. The biggest challenge is that most product marketers are more focused on pushing products than on marketing solutions. What's needed is greater discipline around all of solution marketing -- which is why I created the first Solution Marketing Blog.

The discipline of solution marketing needs to run through all of marketing - not just messaging, customer pain research and sales enablement, but other aspects of the entire SIVA* marketing cycle (Solution-Information-Value-Access) as well:

* Solution establishment - creating a solution that addresses customer pains and their underlying causes

* The process of informing, educating and engaging the market

* Pricing/ROI

* Solution access and channels.

By adding this discipline, and working closely with the sales function, marketers can create consistent messaging and marketing strategies that ultimately help sales teams to drive more revenue.

* The SIVA model was originally put forth by Dev and Schultz about 5 years ago.

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Formalized problem-solution maps help establish a marketing and sales culture where discussing the customer’s pains and reasons in collateral and selling conversations is as natural as a discussing products and features.