THE Solution Marketing Blog

Keynote at ProductCamp Boston: The Invisible Customer

Steve Robins — Sun, 20 May 2012 18:38:53 +0000

Join me On June 9 at Microsoft Cambridge for ProductCamp Boston 2012!

I’ve always been passionate about ProductCamp – I’ve been speaking at ProductCamp Boston since it began in 2009 and am have been leading the marketing team since 2011. So I’m very honored to be delivering the keynote presentation this year.

The theme for ProductCamp Boston 2012 is Customers First! And it’s a fitting theme since customers are so central to the success of our products and solutions, companies, and even our careers.

But as important as they are, sometimes customers can seem to be, well, invisible! Do you ever wonder why no one seems to really understand your customers? How often do you and your colleagues speak with customers? Do you focus only on customer feature requests instead of solving their challenges? Do you find customers confusing?

This year’s ProductCamp Boston keynote presentation will help you to answer these questions and others. Entitled, The Invisible Customer, the keynote will show attendees how to cure Invisible Customer Syndrome. You’ll learn how to identify, understand and better serve current and prospective customer users, buyers and influencers. Get visibility into what’s really driving your customers. And gain a fresh perspective on how to create new, customer-driven opportunities that produce additional revenue streams.

Sound interesting? Great – I encourage you to register for ProductCamp today to reserve your space and learn more about ProductCamp. And click here to learn more about the keynote.

I hope to see YOU at ProductCamp Boston at the Microsoft New England Research & Development (N.E.R.D.) Center in Cambridge on Saturday, June 9! And don’t forget to follow PCamp on Twitter @PCampBoston and #PCampBoston.

Where’s the Customer at Sony?

Steve Robins — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:00:49 +0000

By Steve Robins

It’s time to think outside the box. Or the division. Or the hardware. Or the…

In order to offer complete solutions, companies need to come together around a shared vision of the customer, their challenges, and ways that the company can help. Companies like Sony and AOL Time Warner have been hindered by competing divisions often focused on divisional goals at the expense of the company. By contrast, Apple unified around a common vision of the customer, and a view of a complete solution spanning hardware, software and content.

Last week, The New York Times reported that Sony expected to lose some $6.4 billion this year. Why? According to the NYT,

One by one, every sphere where the company competed — from hardware to software to communications to content — was turned topsy-turvy by disruptive new technology and unforeseen rivals. And these changes only highlighted the conflicts and divisions within Sony.

What’s more, The Times reported that as the company’s luster has tarnished, so too has its ability to charge a premium for its products. And these woes extend beyond Sony. According to The Times, Japanese companies seem to have run out of technology innovations.

Consider this: even before Apple had the iPod or had struck iTunes content deals with record labels, Sony owned the complete ecosystem. But they haven’t been able to harness that power because they failed to bring together an integrated offering early on, and because they clung to closed standards without market traction. As Walter Isaacson wrote in the his biography, Steve Jobs,

“But Sony couldn’t do better [than Apple]. It had pioneered portable music with the Walkman, it had a great record company, and it had a long history of making beautiful consumer devices. It had all of the assets to compete with Jobs’s strategy of integration of hardware, software, devices, and content sales. Why did it fail? Partly because it was a company like AOL Time Warner that was organized into divisions (that word itself was ominous) with their own bottom lines; the goal of achieving synergy in such companies by prodding the divisions to work together was usually elusive.” (pg 407-408).

Sadly, Sony is not alone in the world. In many companies, hardware, software or content rule the day while other solution components get left behind. Sure, those divisional silos might generate short-term revenue and profits. But there’s a bigger, strategic problem here that’s critical to the long-term health of the company. When a company lets its divisions grow into independent silos that fight each other for the same customer, thereby creating disjointed customer experiences, products and/or services, one thing is clear: the company as a whole has lost its focus on the customer – and that’s what’s happened at Sony.

Consider a different scenario. When you start with the customer (and prospect/user/buyer) and understand their top challenges and their needs, interesting things start to happen. First you develop a deep appreciation for the customer. Who are they? What are their hopes and desires (yes, this applies as much to enterprise solutions as it does to consumer solutions)? What keeps them up at night? What problems remain unsolved? And then – and here’s where it really gets fun – you begin to consider how your company can use its particular expertise to solve those problems. How can you best combine your company’s and your partners’ existing and new assets and competencies to create compelling new solutions to customer problems. Putting the customer first does not magically unify silos or bring a company together. But it can give a company a common purpose. It’s a start because it shifts the focus to the folks who really matter and who really keep your lights on: your customers. And when you have a clear focus around them, your other strategies can fall into place.

Bottom line: instead of focusing on divisional objectives alone, you need make sure that the company as a whole unifies around a common vision of who the key customer is, what they need and how you can help them.

Additional Resources

Oscar’s Inconvenient Truths

Steve Robins — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 03:23:18 +0000

By Steve Robins

Watching Sunday’s Oscar awards, I was struck by… the importance – “and inconvenience” – of customer feedback in multiple forms:

Inconvenient focus groups - The mock focus group screening (gasp!) the Wizard of Oz. Very funny but it points to the frustration that artists often feel around Hollywood focus groups that disagree with their artistic vision. And they’re not alone either. It may be inconvenient but those customers do hold the purse strings, so they’re kind of unavoidable after all.
Inconvenient innovations – Billy Crystal’s jabs at bankrupt Kodak, whose name (at least for now) graces the Oscar theater. Hooked on film until it was too late, Kodak missed the inconvenient truth that film was less important than capturing and sharing images in the easiest manner possible. The very company that invented digital photography found that truth inconvenient and now faces a very different and more painful inconvenience – bankruptcy.
Inconvenient movie-consumption - The Oscar ceremony focused again and again on the movie theater experience with many references back to the good old days. Those good old days will indeed live on – but only in people’s memories. Although more people attend movie theaters than theme parks (duh), theater admissions are declining as people consume movies at home on TV, DVDs and iPads. Instead of reminiscing about the good old days, the industry would be better served to focus on the bright future of entertainment everywhere – on mobile, tablets, at home etc.

Customer feedback may seem inconvenient. But not listening to customer feedback delivers the ultimate inconvenience.

Beyond Products: Solution Marketing

Steve Robins — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 21:41:18 +0000

By Steve Robins

February 16 Presentation to the BPMA

Thanks to everyone who attended Thursday’s presentation at the Boston Product Management Association, Beyond Products: Solution Marketing. You helped to make it one of the best discussions I’ve ever led on solution marketing.

You can find the Beyond Products: Solution Marketing presentation slides as well as the Solution Marketing Framework, along with other solution marketing content on Slideshare.

I hope you’ll continue the discussion in a variety of ways:

Before you do anything else, make sure to join the Solution Marketing Pros group on LinkedIn where you can share your successes and get help with your challenges from other solution marketers. The group includes folks from leading companies around the world including…

Acronis, Adobe, ADP, Akamai, Amazon, Ariba, Aspen Technology, Autonomy (HP), Box, Cisco, CSC, Dell, Eloqua, EMC, Endeca, Epicor, FirstBest, Gartner, HCL, Hitachi, Honeywell, H-P, IBM, Informatica, Iron Mountain, KANA Software, Kronos, Level 3 Communications, Lionbridge, McAfee, Microsoft, Misys, Motorola, NetApp, Nortel, Nuance, Oracle, Orange, Pegasystems, Pitney Bowes, Progress Software, Red Hat, Salesforce.com, SAP, Sapient, Seagate Technology, Siemens, SONY, SunGard, Symantec, Tata, TELUS, TIBCO, Time Warner Cable, Tripwire, Verizon, Vertex, Wipro
Follow my Twitter stream for the latest solution marketing news.
Check out additional articles on The Solution Marketing Blog – and be sure to comment!
Come back for next month’s solution pricing presentation by Jim Geisman
Contact me if you have additional questions, s.robins [at] SolutionMKT [dot] com

Special thanks to the great folks at BPMA for organizing this event.

The Value of Value

Steve Robins — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:26:14 +0000

By Steve Robins

Value is Key to Solution Marketing

You might think that the most important aspect of marketing a solution would be what goes into it. What goes into a solution are just a bunch of pieces, products, or components. But value is about the benefit and cost of those components to the user or buyer.

More specifically, value is equal to the difference between (1) the benefit as perceived by the user and (2) the total cost of the solution. By perception I mean that the user or buyer must appreciate and want the resulting benefit. In fact, if they don’t perceive it as a benefit to them, it’s not a benefit but is instead just a useless feature.

Value is interesting in many ways, some of which are counterintuitive and not so obvious. Following are a few important examples – both obvious and not so obvious.

Value is a core component of SEVA(or SIVA) solution marketing strategy which also includes (1) Solution, (2) Education & Engagement and (3) Access.

Value is in the eye of the beholder (not the seller)

Obvious: A cheap solution or product that delivers a lot of benefit is a great value. If you like double cheeseburgers, then a $1 McDouble double cheeseburger is a great value. Remember, this is about what the buyer perceives.
Not obvious: A cheap solution targeted to the wrong audience delivers NO value. If you’re a vegetarian, a $1 meat McDouble is a bad value. In fact, it would have no value to you.

Unique and needed solutions provide more value

Obvious: A $100 aspirin tablet delivers low value if other tablets do the exact same thing and deliver the same benefit at a lower total cost than the $100 tablet.
Not obvious: A $100 tablet of a lifesaving drug is a great value if it’s the only want to save that life. (And in many cases it is). In fact, that same $100 tablet would have great value if the only comparable treatment was a $50,000 operation.

Total cost counts

Not obvious: Assuming both are equally effective, a once-and-done (only one dose required) $100 lifesaving drug, at a total cost of $100, is more valuable than a competitive product requiring 10 doses at $50 each, for a total cost of $500.

Value is core to social media

Maybe obvious: Value applies to your marketing, such as social media, as well. At its core, social media is about sharing content – tweets, photos, blog posts, comments, pluses – with other people who see its value. If you share low value content – perhaps boring self-centered content (“I just woke up; going to be another crappy day”) or salesy, promotional pitches (buy my stuff now!), you’ll turn away your friends, your network, and/or your prospects. Once again, different people will perceive different value based on their interests.
Not so obvious: Social media’s low out-of-pocket costs (i.e., no fee to read content) does not mean that it delivers high value. Low benefit minus low cost still equals low value.

Value shifts as new options emerge

Not obvious: Value is partly comparative, so as alternative solutions or products proliferate, the relative value of your unchanged solution may decline. Once upon a time, newspapers, network TV and radio news shows had a lock on, well, the news since few other options existed. But once the Internet came on the scene, you could obtain news in new (and free) ways through search sites, personal portals, free online Web pages. Suddenly, the same benefit could be achieved for almost no cost to the reader; the value of print news started declined as evidenced by a parallel decline in newspaper readership.

Value – it’s everywhere the user or buyer perceives it to be. And it should be a core element of your solution and solution marketing strategies.

Additional Reading

The Solution Marketing Blog: Fixing the Mix
The Solution Marketing Blog: Value Posts
Successfully Establishing a Winning Twitter Strategy
(check out the second paragraph)