As marketers of technology, we often are challenged to sell the “abstract.” In many cases, most of our IT is sold around core offerings that revolve around delivering intangible, people based services. I bring this knowledge to you knowing it is pretty common and accepted within the technology marketing community.
The purpose of re-enforcing this “selling the abstract” also know as “selling the invisible” or even “selling the solution”, is to keep it top of mind while you are writing your marketing plan. Remember, you are not marketing a product, but a set of solutions that may or may not include hardware. Here are a couple of thoughts you may consider if you find your planning activities stalled as you address this issues. As you write your plan, think about how your content is mapped to ensure you have packaged your message into a more tangible approach. You can start by evaluating your sales teams approach to selling in these messages. Are they solution based selling ? or do you need to create the battle cards or talking points to keep the “solution” message on point and delivered with a more packaged feel.
Have you double checked your over arching message? Does your solution sell/ sound like everyone else? I have found great value exploring other professional service industries (non-tech) marketing approaches. Many service based industry marketing strategies can be translated at some level. Marketing materials from financial firms, consulting firms, accounting firms , even law firms can provide some fresh thinking about how to package up your “solution” message a bit differently than the common industry approach.
In my experience, most sales messages become part of the noise because they spend too much time on specs, feeds, speeds and process. How your solution works is not as important as the outcomes it produces.
Talking ad naseum about your e-commerce solution isn’t as effective as simply saying, “We help companies double their online revenues.”
My plea to marketers: stop boring us with your solution details, your corporate bragging points (you can’t all be the “leading provider” for example) and your methodologies and process. Tell me what business outcomes I can expect .. and if you’re really good … where you’ve delivered them (aka, references!).
Richard,
thanks for your commenst and i whole hardily agree. The outcomes of a solution are truly the value.