When B2B leadership has spent months doing their due diligence to develop a solution that has (1) a market and (2) a compelling business case, they are just half-way done before they can go to market.
For that new solution to ever get in the hands of the right buyer, leadership needs to engage and enable internal teams first, including sales, marketing and product teams — otherwise suffer from a solution launch that putters instead of soars.
Solution Education
Your sales and marketing teams are conditioned to sell to your current buyers as they have in the past. But perhaps there is a new audience who will buy this new solution. Or maybe it is an old target audience but with an adjusted buying cycle or different decision makers within the target organization. Without proper target audience education and understanding, this new solution may be presented to the wrong organizations, the wrong people — missing the mark.
In a literal rocket launch, if the engineers do not understand who their astronauts are and what they are capable of, as well as fail to understand where the end goal of landing is, they will never be able to achieve their mission. Things could go down in a fiery mess.
For selling organizations, this simply means product teams must educate sales and marketing around:
- Target organizations and buyers
- Use cases
- Differentiators
- Value messaging
Solution Enablement
In this same vein, once the internal teams are educated around the new solution and who it will serve, marketing must take the lead to enable salespeople specifically to connect with the new audience with this new solution. These are press releases, launch events, the value proposition, the messaging framework, presentations and more.
Leadership and/or a third-party expert like Mereo can take it a necessary step further in sales trainings, with role-plays and training reinforcement.
In the background, product teams should be working on the solution introduction in terms of launch date, pricing, packaging, hosting centers, subscription details and more.
This is similar to a team of engineers and other scientists working behind the scenes to enable their rocket launch teams and astronauts to safely reach their mission. You need the entire team to ensure each component will go smoothly, to practice the processes and double check their accuracy and potential for success, before anyone can consider putting human bodies on that craft.
A selling organization fails when they allow their new solution to escape to market without a guiding strategy, essential campaigns and activities to enable and align every internal team member.
Learn more about Mereo solution management here.