Spoiler Alert: You won’t unless you leverage a Business Value approach
Guest article by: Steve Siegel (Product Marketing expert, former Clumio, ServiceNow, EMC, and Nokia)
As a marketer, you’ve likely learned to live by the mantra – “Let’s shout above the noise.”
For the last several years, I’ve led product marketing in fast-moving, highly competitive technology and services markets. We had to stand out above the fierce competition to gain precious prospect attention and drive new opportunities. The trouble was, I was often leveraging the same tools in my marketer’s tool belt as everyone else – focusing on new product features that sounded only incrementally better than the new features in the last release. Every vendor has to deal with the feature treadmill. Many updates were me-too features- stuff we needed to match competitive offerings, but these weren’t going to help us stand out.
As I researched strategies, I spent lots of time looking at other solution providers’ websites, seeing how they were marketing themselves. It’s incredible how many websites that still market their features and lead with how their widgets work. It’s as if there’s a belief that we need to speak to every target audience as if they were engineers. I started my career as an engineer, and I can assure you, this is NOT the right approach as very few of the decision making group are engineers. I only have four words of advice on this approach. PLEASE STOP THE INSANITY.
So what changed? Two Words: Business Value
My epiphany came after I commissioned a study to quantify the business value of the services we were marketing. We hired an analyst firm to interview our customers, and they dug into the business outcomes our services helped create. The analyst firm put numbers to the business outcomes – hours and dollars saved along with customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS) improvements. Customer quotes captured the qualitative benefits – users replacing tedious, repetitive work with more exciting work that positively impacted the business and their careers.
This study became a great asset as we started to leverage it in our outreach campaigns and sales calls. As a product marketer, I thought the business value work was complete when we published that first study white paper. It turns out it was only the end of the beginning.
While most business value study white papers are extremely useful, we live in a short-attention-span world, one where buyers expect content to be concise, relevant, and personalized. When was the last time you read a 20-page white paper? Tell the truth now. I rest my case.
As the program evolved, we couldn’t rely on the initial success of the study alone. We needed to find ways to make the analysis results even more visible, compelling, relevant, and personalized, and place these into a comprehensive program that could help our buyers, throughout the buyer’s journey – from discovery and selection through post-sale and optimization.
Lessons Learned
So, here is your cheat sheet – the lessons learned as a seasoned product marketer, which you can use to go beyond the basics and create a business value program that works:
- Quantifying your value impact – It’s quantifying business outcomes and the value you deliver that will make you stand out and differentiate your offering from your competition. This means putting a number as to where typical customers are starting from, and where you were able to take them. The contrast between ‘As Is’ and ‘To Be’ can inspire change, and by defining it in clear, quantifiable terms, it makes the benefits more credible. Having a third party conduct the study and using real customer results dramatically improves the credibility as well.
- Tell your value story – The numbers deliver a useful tool for customers to understand the savings and benefits which can be achieved. However, the quantifiable results are not the entire story as to the value you can deliver to customers. How the value is achieved is equally important. Be sure to package your value impacts into a short story with clear, simple terms that go beyond the quantifiable values alone. Think of your value messaging as a mini-elevator pitch, leveraging storytelling to make it memorable. Start with the pain your prospect is experiencing and the quantified outcomes you can deliver. Briefly explain how you do it, and, the last but most crucial part of the story, include the customer quote and pointer to a case study for credible proof that the results are achievable.
- Lead with Value – Don’t be afraid to lead with business value early in your customer reach-outs and sales engagements. Most believe that business value is best used late in the sales cycle to provide business case justification to financial gatekeepers. However, we find that most buyers are focused on economics right from the get-go, needing to know the solution you offer can solve key challenges and the use-case business value that can be derived. After all, why dedicate any resources to a project that won’t be a priority? Business value used early can be used to get the evaluation to be a priority and get your consideration to the top of the heap. When done right, business value can open up a much richer and insightful set of customer conversations and assure that your proposal doesn’t end in “doing nothing.” Leave those feature reach-outs, demos, and bake-offs to the other guys.
- Focus on single-year returns – (Almost) no one can quickly grasp what a three-year net present value analysis means to them. I know it’s essential to include in any financial justification analysis but leave the multi-year impacts and cash flow analysis in the study for those wanting to dig further into the results. Instead, lead with your single-year benefits. This will be clearer and more impactful to today’s shorter-time horizon decision makers.
- Don’t forget to educate your audience – Most audiences need to learn what the business value impacts mean. Remember, you’re standing out by sounding different – it will be a new approach for many of your sellers, and customers too. Be sure you have the training and innovative methods to simplify the approach and bring your internal and external audiences along in the business value shift and journey. I found success by creating “value playing cards”, documenting key challenges and potential business value outcomes of the services delivered to key stakeholders. By simplifying components of the business value onto the front and back of a card and providing these simple tools to help sellers and customers collaborate on and understand the potential value impacts, we could introduce value to more buyers and quickly educate sellers.
- Value is in the eye of the beholder – Each stakeholder involved in the decision-making has a unique set of pain points, the challenges they seek to overcome, and outcomes they would like to achieve from your solution. It is essential to know your audience and amplify the value perspectives and quantification most important to their individual needs. On one end, you need to be sure you have value stories and quantification for each key decision-making role, and on the other, you leverage just the correct value communications and quantifications relevant to the stakeholders involved. Expect that you’ll have connected value messages that operate at different altitudes across your buying audiences.
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Value is a program, not just a study – The business value white paper might be a good starting point, but your sellers and customers need content across the entire journey to help fuel the best purchase decision and optimize the purchase value. A stand-alone study out on its own on a web-site landing page won’t drive the results you want. You need to create assets as part of a complete value program, including:
- Value messaging, storytelling, and quantification to design value into all aspects of customer engagements and content
- Banner ads, emails, and reach-outs to consistently grab attention on value impacts and potential
- Marketing assets like infographics, presentations, and solution briefs to educate prospects on the business value they could potentially achieve
- Interactive value calculators and sales tools to deliver personalized quantification and value storytelling for each buyer’s unique challenges and opportunities
- Value success stories to prove value results proposed are achievable, leveraging business value engagement results
- Value realization tools to help prove value derived and leverage this for adoption, optimization, renewals, and further business expansion
Transcending beyond features to leverage a business value study and white paper is a great first step, but for me, that was just the start of our business value success. The key was to quickly implement a more comprehensive business value program. As a result, we were able to engage in a more differentiated way, and realize a dramatic improvement in qualified opportunities, boost in win rates and increase in average deal size. In short, we were able to change our customer conversations, and as a result, drive success.
The Bottom-Line
As a product marketer, in a world where product features are commoditized and oft-times indiscernible from different providers, business value can help differentiate your offerings from the competition.
More than a single study and white paper, when business value is part of a complete program using the seven steps highlighted above, you can drive more engagements, inspire quicker buyer decisions and grow your business.
To hear first hand from Steve Siegel, checkout the podcast interview: Product Marketing: How to Best Articulate Your Differentiating Value https://open.spotify.com/episode/1SVnbVaYBPxQWeYnSsbTKX
Steve Siegel is a technology and services product marketing expert, having led significant groups, product line marketing, and innovation at firms including Clumio, ServiceNow, EMC and Nokia.
He can be reached at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenjsiegel/
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