The Case for Buyer-Aligned Value Models…Part 4 of 4

The Case for Buyer-Aligned Value Models…Part 1 of 4

The Case for Buyer-Aligned Value Models…Part 2 of 4

The Case for Buyer-Aligned Value Models…Part 3 of 4

It Takes Vision, Leadership, & Process

Like all cultural transformations, the transition from product-aligned thinking and messaging to solution-aligned thinking and messaging requires management vision, leadership, and process.

The good news is that just like implementing a buyer-aligned sales process, it’s not rocket science, it doesn’t create traumatic culture shock, and it doesn’t take a lot of time, cost, or effort to get started.
 
All management needs to do to get the ball rolling is to decide that they’re going to get serious about supporting a solution oriented strategy. Then they need to make that decision transparent and insure that everybody understands the differences between the hybrid model and buyer-aligned model.

Once the new direction is announced, the next step is to get their best product managers and marketers to develop preliminary problem-solution maps for each solution. It should only take them a couple of hours to do this, and while it may push some of them outside of their comfort zone a bit, I promise that everybody involved  will learn a lot about their solution’s true value and their organization’s ability to actually sell solutions in the process. 

Once the problem-solution map is complete the key thought leaders in the sales organization need to validate it. This validation process is important because it gets marketing and sales on the same page when it comes to the messaging strategy, thereby eliminating a key issue in the marketing-sales disconnect. 

And finally, after sales has validated the problem-solution map, the final step in the transformation process, as shown in Figure 2, is for the marketing organization to make that map the intellectual foundation for all new marketing deliverables.

Figure 3: Make Your Map the Foundation 
Adopting a buyer-aligned value model and implementing a formal problem-solution mapping process is one of the best things a marketing organization can to do increase its strategic relevance to the enterprise and its impact on sales. It will allow them to:

• Create more relevant and impactful customer facing content that demonstrates that their company truly understands the customer’s problem as well as the best way to  fix it
• Do a better job of generating, cultivating, and nurturing  leads through richer interactions and targeted messages by problem, stakeholder, and market segment
• Improve their alignment with sales and deliver tools that enable salespeople to have more meaningful  business and value conversations with their customers so that they accelerate the transition from product sellers to problem solvers to trusted partners

Finally, one of the key collateral benefits of a buyer-aligned value model and a well constructed problem-solution map is that they create an additional filter for evaluating and prioritizing new product development requests. In other words, if something doesn’t improve the value and differentiation from our customer’s perspective why build it?

Conclusion

Making the transition from products to solutions requires both a marketing and sales transformation, and for a lot of companies, two pieces of the puzzle are already in place.  Sales organizations have been trained and they’ve implemented buyer-aligned sales processes. The final piece of the puzzle is a buyer-aligned value model, and only marketing can make that happen.

In the end it comes down to what kind of marketing organization you want to be. For years CEOs have been saying that they want to create a more customer focused culture that provides solutions to customer problems. Marketing organizations now have a unique opportunity to increase their strategic relevance and their impact on sales by becoming the catalyst that finally makes the CEO’s vision a reality.