Do not be afraid to challenge your engine and engage your customers.
Your solution management strategy is the main sustenance of your organization’s sustainability. Without a solution, you have nothing to offer, nothing to sell. And without a solid and strategically evolving solution strategy, your organization will not stay abreast of any market change for very long into the future.
A solution management strategy needs to take target buyers’ greatest needs — their greatest unsolved pains — as input and output to the world an innovative answer. This is all common sense.
Yet these best practices are scarily too often not common practice in solution management strategy.
Too often senior leaders do not do what they know is intrinsically right or what appears to be attractive from a market opportunity standpoint. Instead they back down when the technical team pushes a different investment plan.
Who Is Right? Let the Customer Decide.
While certainly not the only source of input, letting the customers help define your solution strategy and the associated prioritization of resources is sound and proven to work. Engaging customers and prospects early — and often — in solution roadmap discussions leads to:
- Greater confidence in resource investments
- Easier garnering of early adopters
- References
- An accelerated market launch
Fight against what is easy or appealing. Fight for serving your buyers with the best, to make them their best. Listen to your buyers. Your next solution awaits at the intersection of the words of their woes and the strengths of your organization.
Strategic Solution Management in Action
One B2B organization Mereo had the pleasure to serve had never engaged customers in their strategy or prioritization partially out of habit (we know what is best) and partly because they did not believe they could get an audience.
With Mereo’s help they engaged North American and European customers in two day and a half sessions, attracting C-level interest from some of the world’s largest financial services firms.
The customers were thrilled to be engaged, the company gained critical insight into resource allocation and the organization were happily surprised to realize a 20% boost in sales as a result of improved executive alignment.
When you are in the position to launch a high-value solution, download the Mereo “Product Launch” eBook for further insights and a proven framework.