There is no arguing it: Today’s selling organizations need aligned teams to achieve success. But with so many moving pieces, how do you bring your solution marketing teams’ efforts together to best support the revenue motion?
A single source of truth.
This cannot be an assumed source of truth or disjointed resources you hope your marketing and sales professionals will pick up on. Your organization needs a tangible and formal way to guide your professionals on the right path — as one.
At Mereo, we help drive this alignment with the solution perspective document. This one source of truth forms the basis for all enablement and solution-focused marketing and sales content. Often, creating this is easier said than done.
As head of marketing, you must gather vital data and key inputs, engaging numerous stakeholders and subject matter experts to craft this important tool. But if you are intentional in making your solution perspective document right, it can make all the difference in leading united efforts and developing consistent content that drives sustainable performance. Keep reading, and we will share how to get started.
KEY ELEMENTS OF A SOLUTION PERSPECTIVE
There exists great power in perspective. With it, you develop a common understanding of market and buyer dynamics. You also create a lean content supply chain along with impactful sales and marketing content, focusing your team on the issues and needs your buyers face, how your solutions uniquely address them and the value they deliver. To start building your solution perspective document, focus on these key elements.
- MARKET OVERVIEW: Provide your team the big-picture foundation by including key trends shaping the industry, your line of business or solution area, and critical challenges your target buyers face.
- BUSINESS IMPERATIVES AND IMPACT: Spell out the goals and objectives for your team that will drive you closer to your organization’s strategic vision, as well as the financial, market and operational impact your efforts will help achieve.
- SOLUTION POSITIONING: Codify the position you intend to take in the market, reflecting how your solutions work together to address buyer needs and the value this delivers. Often, to get this part of the solution perspective document right, you need to collaborate closely with product management, sales engineering, consulting and value engineering.
- CLIENT VALUE STORIES: How can you validate your solution and messaging? Proof. Gather multiple client proof-points to substantiate how your solutions create value for the buyer.
Doing proper research is essential to make this document as accurate and valuable as possible. Prepare to interview subject matter experts, glean key supporting facts from published research materials, leverage AI tools for research and validation, and gather buyer proof-points. This important groundwork will give you raw material to substantiate trends, challenges, needs and the value your solutions deliver.
Turning those inputs into a unified document takes a village. While some organizations have specific subject matter experts responsible for solutions addressing the needs of buyers in specific industries, many have multiple stakeholders who may even have competing points of view. In this scenario, we recommend taking a curation approach by working across stakeholder groups to gather information, distill it and create the solution perspective document as a unified point of view for the entire stakeholder community. This creates shared understanding and becomes another powerful dimension of perspective.
LEVERAGE YOUR OWN FORCE MULTIPLIER
When all is said and done, your solution perspective document will become a shared gift in substantiating how your solutions address buyer’s needs and in showcasing buyer value realization. Most importantly, this document will bring your teams together, on the same page. The consistent content and messaging that results will be a force multiplier — foundational to shaping your market perception over time.
Want to learn more? Interested in expert support? Reach out to our revenue experts with a message today or set up a 30-minute call to discuss further.