The pressure on B-to-B product marketing organizations to increase their strategic relevance and their impact on sales has never been greater. They have to quickly find a way to:

• Create more customer relevant positing and content
• Do a better job of generating, cultivating, and nurturing leads
• Improve their alignment with sales and deliver tools that enable salespeople to have more meaningful business and value conversations with their customers

These are tall orders, and for a lot of marketing organizations they’ll require a fundamental transformation in their thinking as well as their day to day behavior.

So, what can marketing executives do to start this transformation?

First…Get Serious About Solution Messaging

For the past few decades, thought leaders like Pragmatic Marketing have been telling product marketing organizations that one of the best ways to increase their strategic impact was to make the transition from product focused messaging that reflects the inside-out perspective of the seller to more problem focused messaging that reflects the outside-in perspective of the buyer.

The good news is that some companies have finally got the memo.  As a recent best practices study by CSO Insights showed, companies with marketing organizations that explicitly focus on communicating their understanding of the customer’s problems along with how their solutions help the customer solve those problems experience:

• 25% higher quota attainment
• 20% higher win rates
• 3 times the competitive win rate
• 5 times less discounting

So, why haven’t more marketing organizations figured out how to create customer relevant messaging that truly supports a solution based strategy? Unfortunately, while some companies have successfully transformed the way their sales people sell through rigorous sales training programs and buyer -aligned sales processes, most of those companies haven’t applied the same kind of strategic focus or transformational emphasis on product marketing.  

As a result, few marketing executives or their organizations understand some of the key fundamentals, nuances, and implications of solution messaging. Most give little thought to the underlying value model their organizations use to communicate the purpose, value, and differentiation of their company’s products and services, and few have implemented any systematic processes to reinforce solution messaging fundamentals and best practices.  

To be continued… The Case for Buyer-Aligned Value Models Part 2 of 4 will post Friday, March 12.

Want to learn more about Solution Marketing and Buyer-Aligned Value Models for Sellers? Join SPI and Author Bob Schmonsees for an upcoming webinar: Equipping the Sales Mind of the Future, March 23. To register, click here.