How do we speak to customers?
There is an evolution that most organisations go through in their sales and marketing motions. Typically they will start by selling a product since that is how they started, and then over time as they expand their product set they need to diversify sales and marketing. Now, consider that you’re an organisation with 20 products. You could sell those 20 products individually. Or you could sell bundles of two products each – potentially double the value for less than double the sales effort. There are 190 combinations of 2 products from your set of 20. There are 1,140 combinations if you bundle three products together. So say you do have 20 different products that could be grouped in different combinations and consider this question: how should Sales decide what to sell? Selling larger deals can be a strategic benefit: it positions you as a more significant partner, you can make more profit from them and, per dollar sold, they may cost less to actually sell. But if Sales has to decide from a huge number of potential options, how can they possibly grow efficiently?
The answer, of course, is that you don’t sell all of the possible combinations. Data – specifically sales, competitor and market data – should inform a process of prioritisation so that you arrive on a combination of products that support a customer need and that you can execute against. Solutions are collections of product capabilities, use cases and customer value that meet identified business challenges. Solution selling is more profitable than selling discrete products, solutions can usually be better differentiated in highly competitive markets and can offer greater strategic value to customers.
There is another benefit to marketing solutions rather than products too. When marketing a solution, you’re marketing value to the customer. It’s about them. The customer’s vision for success is what you’re selling, how it will solve their challenges, create value for their organisation, reduce their risk, increase their innovation or support other attributes. Features, functions and products still support the solution, but you’re leading with the customer’s benefit rather than leading with your brilliance.
But solutions also bring their own challenges. Solutions can require industry differentiation to make them relevant and competitive against other industry players. There is a balance of striving for scale while maintaining specificity and relevance to the audience. Say you managed to get your 20 products and their thousands of combinations down to 10 solutions that you want to go to market with; you could quickly find that with 10 industry variants that you are back up to 100 industry solution variants. The deadlock is only broken by prioritising work to achieve maximum value.
Enterprise buyers typically operate as buying groups – even if the group is not fully defined, understood or communicated, multiple influences will be considered before a decision is made. In the context of products and solutions a Buying Group is comprised of a collection of different Job Functions. Each Job Function has business Imperatives – things they must do in the form of challenges they must solve, risks they must mitigate or opportunities they must seize. You have a Solution, which is a set of Product Capabilities that map to the Buying Group’s Imperatives. And each of those Product Capabilities will have Use cases and Value that you can use to inform the differentiated positioning and can act as proof points. Your go-to-market approach will be to communicate these Use Cases and Value aligned to your prospect’s Imperatives and target those communications at the collective Job functions in the Buying Centre. These different elements can be considered visualised like the below:
Whether you agree with all of his conclusions or not, Simon Sinek’s Start With Why should be required reading for marketing and business leaders. Great leaders, the book says, all communicate the same way. They lead with purpose; they lead with why. Leaders, of course, are not just people; organisations can be leaders in their field. Is an organisation perceived as being a leader because it always communicates its purpose, or did it become a leader because it always leads with purpose?
Why ‘Why’ works as a lead is because ‘because’ is the answer. ‘Because’ is quite literally means as ‘for the reasons that’. ‘For the reasons that’ is the foundations of bridging a context gap. It is an opener that connects whatever starting point a person may have to a level of common understanding from which further communication can build. ‘Because’ is normally also the basis of a story. Because the Empire built the Death Star, the Rebel Alliance had to blow it up. Because the Nazis wanted the Ark of the Covenant, Indiana Jones had to stop them. Because Sauron wanted the One Ring, the fellowship had to destroy it. Because, because, because.
Let’s take Salesforce as an example. For many years Salesforce positioned itself as the alternative to the legacy CRM providers selling software. ‘No software’ was part of the Salesforce story where four founders set out to create a product and business model that sold in the cloud. Because software is costly upfront, requires you to manage your own hardware to run it and is slower to innovate on, cloud is the way to go. Purpose and closing the context gap also communicated customer value. It was simple; it was repeated consistently; it was tangible (you didn’t buy the same way as you would from, say, Oracle); it was unexpected (how could you have technology without software?); it had an emotive; anti-establishment rebellion about it; and it had the human story of people trying to change the world. It worked so well the rest of the tech world also went to the cloud and it was no longer surprising or emotive: it was what you expected. But as cloud became the established norm, saying you were against software lost resonance and the positioning and focus was forced to change and Salesforce had to re-find its purpose. This can happen as the world changes.
Starting with why builds bridges across the Context gap and builds resonance against your brand and solutions. This is why great organisations understand that messaging frameworks and solution frameworks needs to bring together purpose, messaging and value into a consistently executed go-to-market approach. Solution and Messaging frameworks are not about reducing the creativity of marketers; they’re about reducing random acts of marketing that at best delude marketers into thinking that doing something different will somehow be better, and at worst can harm or detract against a brand with diluted or contradictory statements. For some Marketing teams it can be an exciting chance to stretch their creative muscles, but for the wider organisation paying an agency to come up with an innovative (read: off-message) creative approach is an efficiency drain.
Value messaging frameworks should provide clear direction for all teams to communicate to the market, but should not dictate too tightly such that the opportunity to effectively experiment within them and drive action is impacted. They should enable you to tell the story to whatever audience you’re speaking to, and do so in a way that connects audiences into a unified, relevant narrative.
Layer 1: your organisation’s purpose and the reason you exist in the world. Your purpose is lived and breathed through your external brand presence and your internal decision making
Layer 2: the value you create to realise your purpose. These are not the solutions you over but at a higher level what your solutions allow customers to do. This value is communicated as the embodiment of your purpose.
Layer 3: The solutions you offer customers. Solutions communicate use case and value that meets the needs and business imperative of the buying group to which the solution is targeted.
Layer 4: The products and product features you sell. If you sell services this same approach is still applicable.
Together these layers and messages form a framework that may look like the below. All content should be built against it, all campaigns messaged against it, all creative visualises it and all campaigns activate it.
A Value Messaging Framework does not have to limit or restrict how campaigns communicate with customers. This is a framework for communicating customer value and while it may contain clearly defined messages that articulate that value, exact messaging needs be developed from this. Your thought leadership should uniquely articulate your understanding of the market and customers, aligned to your purpose. Your programs, campaigns and offer content articulate your brand, your thought leadership, and your value through connected stories. And you integrate these messages together across the customer’s journey and for the buying group. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.