A lot of B2B marketing efforts fail to resonate with buyers because they do not start with buyer needs, focus on how solutions uniquely address them or consider how they create value. According to a Gartner study on customer buying journeys, 75% of B2B buyers consider their last purchase difficult or complex, so it is vital to produce content that highlights what makes your solutions different and how they address those complex buyer requirements.
HOW CAN YOU MAKE THIS WORK IN YOUR WORLD?
Creating and maintaining authentic solution marketing content can be daunting, especially across multiple audiences, industries or lines of business. Throughout my career, I have led solution marketing teams for several large enterprise software providers and have developed a repeatable and successful method you can use to differentiate your offerings, supercharge sales enablement, and drive pipeline and revenue growth.
The approach is intentionally simple: Produce a core piece of content that can be leveraged for enablement and can serve as source material for impactful messaging and solution-focused marketing across channels and programs. These materials are then used in roll-out / enablement efforts, and they form the basis for integrated sales and marketing campaigns.
Having everyone on the same page with a coordinated approach to positioning solutions to specific buyer needs drives significant results. For example, my last team built $40 million in pipeline over 12 weeks targeting 154 dormant accounts with a coordinated demand generation campaign across sales and marketing.
FIND POWER IN PERSPECTIVE
The nucleus of the approach is to develop a “solution perspective” document that includes a market overview covering key trends shaping the industry, line of business or solution area, along with critical challenges buyers face. These well-researched reference documents clearly identify business imperatives, substantiate business impact and showcase specific solutions to help buyers address them. They also include multiple buyer proof-points to substantiate how your solutions create value.
These documents become required reading and a core component of sales, sales engineering, consulting and marketing enablement efforts. They are also used to create marketing content supporting web and social media presence, as well as integrated sales and marketing campaigns.
Doing proper research is essential to make this work. Interview subject matter experts, read published research, leverage AI tools for research and validation, and gathering buyer proof-points. This will give you raw material to substantiate trends, challenges, needs and the value your solutions deliver.
It is important to note that creating these documents can often take 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 regarding them. In this scenario, we recommend taking a curation approach; working across stakeholder groups to gather information, distill it and create a unified point of view that becomes a gift to unify the stakeholder community. While you can do this virtually, a workshop serves to unite the experts in a single location, accelerating the process. This collective approach becomes a powerful dimension of perspective.
LESS IS MORE
A lean content supply chain that focuses on re-use for multiple audiences is the essential foundation to make this work at scale. A leading practice we ascribe to is working backward from the outcomes that need to be accomplished to determine what specific artifacts need to be created. Think of this as a “minimum equipment list” rather than a full bill of materials. It is vital to minimize the number of pieces of content that are created if you operate in an environment where you need to position your solutions to different buyers across lines of business or industries.
Once you decide what you are going to produce, the fun starts.
- First, create, socialize and share a “solution perspective” document with all key stakeholders.
- Once you have alignment on that foundation, create the specific assets you decided are essential for that market segment (e.g., industry or line of business).
- Be ruthless about streamlining the number of derivative assets you create and approach them by using the “solution perspective” document — reshaping the content for the target asset type or medium (writing for social media is very different than an eBook or webpage), which helps keep your content consistent and relevant.
DRIVE IMPACT WITH INTEGRATED EXECUTION
I like to deliver the complete set of content for each focus area before starting formal roll-out efforts. In some organizations, revenue enablement has a particular rhythm and cycle, and in that case, using the complete set of external content produced over time is helpful in the scheduled enablement efforts. In other organizations, enablement is an always-on or repetitive process. In that scenario, enablement is best served using an incremental approach, for example industry-by-industry. Either way, the “solution perspective” document should become required reading, and any derivative enablement assets should be based on it.
The real power of this approach shines in the form of integrated sales and marketing campaigns targeting key buyers with a focus on their needs, your unique solutions and the value they can offer. The very best of these campaigns start with buyer proof-points that effectively position your solutions.
By taking this coordinated approach across marketing channels, all the ways you communicate and your sales motions, you’ll create consistency, help differentiate your offerings, and drive pipeline and revenue performance.
Interested in learning more? Book a call with one of our experts to build your business with solution marketing in 2025.