Today Apple announced additional details of AppleWatch as well as a new, slimmer (!) MacBook line at a media event in San Francisco. Apple is an iconic company and their innovation can provide helpful lessons, many of which apply to solution marketers. Which takes me to the AppleWatch: Needing to be tethered to a iPhone via WiFi, and carrying a not-insignificant price for an optional gizmo, it’s not clear how well this new product will perform I the market. But if anyone can make a go of it, Apple can. Here’s why. Continue reading
Category Archives: Solution Marketing Strategy
How Apple Creates a Future that Sells
Cyber Lessons from Black Friday
Black Friday offers an important lesson for cyber (i.e., enterprise software) solution marketers.
Bombarded by Black Friday
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been bombarded with a never-ending stream of Black Friday TV commercials. These included a litany of TV commercials for BMWs and other cars on sale for Black Friday. Maybe it’s all due to a surge in self-gifting, although experts were predicting a drop for 2014.
In a world where everything from clothes to cars was on sale on or around Black Friday, retailers were competing against just about every other retailer for the $381 that the typical shopper spent this past weekend, according to the National Retail Federation. That included direct competitors offering similar goods, indirect competitors who offered different goods that solved the same problem (say, giving a nice gift) and what I’ll call Share of Budget competitors who solved different problems but competed for the same budget.
Filed under Solution Marketing Strategy, Solutions, Value
Beyond Products: Solution Marketing
By Steve Robins
February 16 Presentation to the BPMA
T
hanks 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
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. Continue reading
Building Your Solution Marketing Strategy
By Steve Robins
Where Are You in the Solution Marketing Lifecycle?
The obvious part of solution marketing is what gets delivered at the end of the process in the go-to-market phase – materials, web content and more. But the heavy lifting begins well before. Following are highlights of the key phases required to build and implement a successful solution marketing strategy. Continue reading
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