Ralph Vetsch has served as VP of Sales for several B2B technology companies and is sharing his real-world experience with channel readiness. 

The primary role of the sales organization is to sell. The primary role of the product and marketing organizations is to make selling easier.  

Too often, product management and marketing teams simply toss their products, marketing materials, and sales leads over the wall to the sales team. There is insufficient regard for how easy the product is to sell (or even if it is ready), whether the sales materials effectively accelerate the customer’s buying journey, or whether the leads are qualified.   

A reliable sign of lack of sales channel readiness is finger pointing and poor relationships among sales, product and marketing teams. 

It’s vital first to understand what it means to be “channel ready.” Based on our experience with dozens of B2B companies, organizations that treat product readiness and sales readiness as separate, linear components of the process are typically not as successful as organizations that see product and sales as a collaborative effort to ensure that the sales organization (either direct or indirect) is channel ready. 

While the details determining channel readiness will often differ from organization to organization, we have identified eight key action items that make up the minimal list of elements that should be in place.   

The Channel Readiness Action List

1.Defining the target customer(s):  

Identify the ideal customers. Define the target customer and the characteristics that make up that target customer. The more granular, the better. Channel ready organizations go beyond industry sector and firmographic data. They include psychographic and behavioral data to understand the customer’s decision journey, what motivates them and how they make decisions.

Learn More: Definitive Guide to Buyer Personas 

2. Aligning the sales process with the customer buying process:  

Have you defined (and documented) the sales process that maps to the buyer journey? Do you understand how marketing can increase sales’ effectiveness at each stage of the journey? Do you know which customer journey stages are most likely to slow the sales cycle—and do you have the right sales tools to address those?

Read: Mapping Your Sales Tools to the Customer Journey

3. Defining and addressing the competition: 

Do you know who or what your actual competition is? Are you losing most business opportunities to other vendors? Or to the status quo? Or to the customer’s decision to do it themselves (in-house)? Do you have the strategies and tools to address all of your competition?

Learn More: [Distinctive Competency] What Companies Can Learn from the Tennis Elbow Queen

4. Understanding and addressing customer objections:  

Do you have a documented list of common objections with how and when to handle them? Are your sales teams amply trained and rehearsed to identify and combat objections effectively?

Learn more:  Advanced Strategy For Building Effective Sales Battle Cards

5. Defining effective pricing:  

Does your pricing make sense? Is it easy to understand? Can sales correctly price the opportunity on their own? Are your sales teams too prone to drop prices to win business? Do they have sufficient training and tools to reduce the need to discount?

6. Generating mindshare and interest:  

Do you know how to get target customers to pay attention and truly understand your offering and its differentiation? Do you have a list of (magic) questions the sales team can use to establish the need and urgency and define the solution?

7. Building credibility and reducing perceived risk:  

Do you have a documented list of customer success stories that sales can use to show the customer that you can be trusted to be their business partner. Do you have the processes and tools to ensure that sales can quickly identify the best customer success stories and reference that best align to their specific sales opportunities?

8. Offering supporting technical details: 

Do you have documented product specifications that tie back to benefits that can validate your product with the customer and thwart the competition? Do you have the processes and tools to ensure sales can quickly access the most applicable and valuable technical details that best align with their specific customers’ needs and the competitive situation. 

Of course, collecting and communicating this information is not easy. Data collection and consensus building is needed to arrive at the answers. That consensus building starts with the collaborative alignment of product/marketing and sales teams. While this may be daunting for many organizations, ensuring a channel ready sales channel should be one of the product and marketing teams’ top priorities.   

Find Your Next (Or First) Pragmatic Course 

Pragmatic Institute offers eight product courses to help you take your career to the next level: Foundations, Focus, Market, Build, Design, Launch, Price and Insight. Use our course selector tool to help you identify which course will help you achieve your goals. 

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As marketing shifts to digital spaces with each passing year, marketers must communicate their value propositions quickly and clearly to capture customer attention.

So, let’s explore exactly why value propositions are so important, how to write your own, and how to evaluate your performance.

What is a value proposition?

In marketing, a value proposition is a clear, concise statement summarizing what goods or services a company offers, and highlighting the value that the company delivers to customers.
A value proposition may highlight the quality of a product, a unique experience that the company offers to customers, or may evoke an emotion (such as luxury).

Why are value propositions important?

Value propositions are important to marketers because they help customers quickly and clearly understand what your company offers and what differentiates your company from others in the market. This is especially important when customer attention is at a premium, especially on digital platforms. A customer who lands on your site through a paid digital ad or organic search may not have time to read a detailed page about your company. Communicating your value proposition in a few short sentences helps the customer understand your company and can help drive conversions.

Why is customer attention so valuable?

In the digital age, customer attention is a valuable commodity. At any time, many different messages and media compete for your customer’s attention. In a digital media landscape saturated with information and targeted ads catching and retaining your customer’s attention can be a challenge. For example, if your customer is browsing for your product on a mobile phone browser, they may not only see search results or your product – they may see dozens of other products listed on the search results page. Those organic search results may compete with paid ads for related products. While browsing, they may be watching or listening to other media that could distract from their search. This is just one example of how customer attention is split between many competing messages and priorities, and why customer attention is so vital.

 The 10-Second Rule of Customer Attention

Since customer attention is at a premium, you may wonder how long you have to grab your customer’s attention with a marketing message. The answer is just 10 seconds. User experience data and market research conducted by the Neilson Normal Group have demonstrated that companies have a maximum of 10 seconds to grab a customer’s attention. That time may vary depending on the audience you are capturing and the demands on their attention at the time that they engage with your message. A potential new customer who is browsing Google search pages may have different demands on their attention than a current customer who is opening an email from your company or passing your booth at a trade show.

Customer Attention and Website Experience

When you are communicating your value proposition on digital marketing channels, technical factors such as page load time can increase bounce rates. That makes it less likely that your customers will see and respond to your message. This is especially important for mobile visits. Research has found that website conversion rates drop 4.42% with each passing second of page load time between 0 and 5 seconds. This is more extreme for users engaging on mobile devices. Google Consumer Insights research has found that 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Ensuring that technical aspects of your website, such as page load time, are performing well can help ensure that your customers see your value proposition at all. Furthermore, prospective customers may be landing on pages where you don’t expect them to land. Due to user search behavior, companies cannot rely on a website homepage as the main place to communicate their proposition. Use analytics tools to look at your company’s top website landing pages. Then, use the steps below to optimize each page for your value proposition.

How to write a great value proposition for your website

How do you know if your messaging is strong? You can use the 10 second test for evaluating value proposition. Look at your website, social media, paid advertisements, or other marketing materials. In less than 10 seconds, those marketing materials should communicate these 3 messages:

1. Who you are: Clearly express who your company is. Your logo and company name should be prominent and easy to read. This may seem obvious, but it’s not always implemented.
2. What you do: Don’t just indicate what you produce (i.e., “we design and produce quality [fill in the blank] products”) or offer (i.e., “we offer professional development coaching”). Identify the primary customer pain points or market problems you solve. Hit on the issue that keeps your prospects up at night. Generally, you should clearly demonstrate how your company will help them overcome a critical obstacle or reach a key business goal.
3. Who you serve: Clearly define who you serve so that prospective customers can quickly identify themselves as someone you or your product supports. This can be based on a range of parameters, such as industry, size or type of business, role or title, or other defining and relatable details.

If your prospects understand who you are, what you do, and who you serve, they can make an informed decision about whether to learn more about your business or move on. If they decide to move on, so be it. What’s important is that their decision is based on an accurate understanding of the value you offer.

What are the benefits of having a clear value proposition?

Having a clear value proposition has clear benefits for any company.

1. Immediate engagement. Capturing customers’ attention with a strong value proposition makes them more likely to engage further with your content before moving on to something else.
2. Clear differentiation. In any messaging, your company should seek to distinguish your brand from competitors by highlighting how your company addresses your audience’s problems.
3. Efficient communication. Being clear and concise ensures that the most important information is conveyed to the customer first. This can help reduce bounce rates or confused responses from your customers.
4. Improve conversion rates. This is particularly important on digital channels. When website visitors quickly understand who you are, what you do, and how you can help them, they are more likely to follow calls to action and proceed further through the customer journey.
5. Increase retention. This doesn’t just refer to customer retention. When information is clear, compelling, and memorable, you increase the chances that the customer will remember that information. This can lead to future customer interactions.
6. Brand reinforcement. When your value proposition is communicated clearly across different platforms, this can reinforce your brand identity and build recognition and trust among your target audience.

What are the risks of having an unclear value proposition?

On the other hand, having an unclear value proposition (or no value proposition at all) can put your business at risk.

1. Customer confusion. Without a clear value proposition, customers may not see or understand how your product solves their problems or addresses their needs. This can create confusion and lead to disinterest and abandonment.
2. Decreased conversions. Confused customers are less likely to take key calls to action and are less likely to ultimately become paying customers.
3. Wasted marketing resources. Without a clear and effective message, marketing campaigns can fall flat. That can translate to lost work hours, effort, and ad spend.
4. Inefficient sales process. If customers are confused by unclear or inconsistent brand messaging, sales teams may struggle to communicate your company’s offerings. If a customer is confused, or worse – frustrated, that could lead to lost sales.
5. Reduced customer loyalty. Unclear messaging not only impacts prospective customers. It can harm existing customers, too. Your current customers may not understand the full scope of your products or services. Therefore, they may miss out on offers that could help them. These unfulfilled needs can translate to reduced loyalty and customer retention over time.
6. Competitive disadvantage. Ultimately, all these factors over time can lead to a competitive disadvantage. Competitors with clearer messaging can capture customers who your company may have been able to serve had the value proposition been clearer.

What are the top 3 mistakes businesses make when writing a value proposition?

We know that companies must communicate their value proposition in 10 seconds or less. Here are three common pitfalls to writing an effective value proposition statement:

1. The primary message is not concise. Keep your messaging simple and easy to read. The primary message should be the headline of your value proposition. It should grab your customer’s attention, ideally in 7 words or less.
2. The primary message is unclear. Your primary message must be simple and easy for your target audience to understand. A primary message that is too vague or that includes too much detail can make your audience misunderstand or misinterpret your primary message. This can happen when the desire to be creative supersedes the clarity of the writing.
3. The primary message is buried. Even if you’ve clearly and concisely captured your primary message, your customer won’t see it if it is buried on the page. Your audience doesn’t have time to read through paragraphs of copy. Make your primary message the first thing they see.

How can you retain customer attention after you communicate your value proposition?

Once your content passes the 10-second test, you’ve likely earned about another 20 seconds of your prospective customer’s attention, according to the Neilson Norman Group. Those 20 seconds are critical. Explain what makes your company uniquely qualified to address the prospect’s critical problem or help them reach their key goal. To do this, you need to understand their pervasive problems.

By centering your message around how your company can solve those problems, your customer can understand what differentiates you and how you will help them reach their goals.

The post How to Use Value Proposition to Capture Your Customer’s Attention appeared first on Pragmatic Institute - Resources.

It’s no surprise, then, that out of the thousands of new products launched every year, 95% will fail, according to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, as reported by Inc. magazine. And while poor concepts and badly designed products may account for some of these failures, often the failure is fueled by weak product launches that lack the ability to resonate with target audiences and establish a strong differentiation.

Using reverse engineering, Inspira Strategies, with insights from MarketReach, developed a four-step process to help companies overcome critical product launch hurdles. To uncover this process, we:

• Identified and extracted the core reasons clients don’t buy a new product (i.e., why a product launch typically fails)
• Arranged those reasons into their typical order of occurrence
• Looked for solutions for each element

The resulting process focuses on four hurdles B2B companies must sequentially leap to achieve product launch success.

Hurdle No. 1: No Interest

Lack of interest is the first, most important reason customers don’t buy a new product and simply ignore the offer. They learn about the new product online, receive emails about it, or see it at a tradeshow, but they simply don’t seem to notice it—at least, not enough to make it a priority to examine further.

This is unsurprising. People are busy, have reduced attention spans, and are bombarded daily with ads and messages. So, how do you cut through the clutter and catch their attention? The answer is simple, if counterintuitive: Stop talking about your product. Instead, start talking about the problem your product solves.

To accomplish this, you must thoroughly examine the question, “Why do our customers need our product?” Customers care about solving their problems; moreover, the more intense the problem, the more motivated they are to solve it. Urgent problems are likely keeping them up at night. If you have a solution that addresses the critical issues that keep customers awake, you’re going to more readily gain their attention.

Consider the case of VMware, a cloud computing infrastructure company founded in 1998 that, in 2019, hit $7 billion in revenue. The company started with a product-specific approach. In its early days, the core message was “run two operating systems on the same computer.” As a result, many of their clients were physics and chemistry professors—the few professionals who understood the advantage. The running joke was, “VMware isn’t for everybody; you have to be very smart.”

The clear challenge was how to grow revenue when many computer operators didn’t truly understand the value of running two operating systems on the same computer. The company’s answer was to stop talking so much about the product and its features and start talking about the problems it could solve.

VMware realized that corporate IT professionals had a big problem that the company could solve. At the time, servers were extremely expensive, difficult to maintain, and vastly underused (users needed one server for each operating system). VMware began educating corporate IT professionals on how its virtualization product could allow companies to use fewer servers or power down underused hardware by shifting work to other machines. The approach was called the “one server to rule them all.”

Gradually, VMware stopped talking about multi-OS in computers and elevated its message to educate corporate IT professionals on how they could save significant dollars on operational costs. Their key insight: Most IT people looking to reduce their operations costs were not aware that VMware’s virtualization could help them, they had to be told.

The company achieved growth by building a bridge between its virtualization solution and IT professionals who had an operational-cost problem. VMware stopped talking as much about its products and features and instead addressed the problems customers face.

Questions to Consider

• Why do our clients need our product?
• Is it possible that many clients won’t know why they need our product?
• Are we talking about product details to someone with an operations, sales, or cost problem?

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Hurdle No. 2: No Difference

After successfully capturing your customers’ attention by focusing on their key problems, the next hurdle you face is the “no difference” hurdle. This is when customers notice your offer and understand the problem you solve … but also know of other, similar companies that claim to solve the same problem. Bombarded with sales information by competing companies, the customer eventually becomes indifferent to these offers and simply ignores them all. Or, they may choose to focus solely on price to drive purchases, bringing profit margins down further.

How can you avoid this and stay ahead of the competition? Even better, how can you make the competition irrelevant? The answer here is, rather than focusing on why you are better, create your own category with messages that express why you are first. You can achieve this by developing a unique value proposition, which works because customers focus less on what is better and more on what is new. This concept is best illustrated with an example from the consumer marketplace, although it applies equally to B2B technology companies.

In 1965, the car manufacturer Volvo was in trouble. It was small, struggling and competing against major players like GM, Ford, BMW, Mercedes, Toyota and Honda. At that time, these auto giants were expanding internationally to increase sales volume and decrease costs. Volvo knew it couldn’t compete in the general “car manufacturer” category, so it created a new category: the “safe car manufacturer.”

Volvo began promoting safety as the primary differentiator of its cars, effectively segmenting the market and making itself the No. 1 car in the “safe car” segment. In the mid-1960s, this was revolutionary. No other car manufacturer had attempted to focus on safety, nor had they focused on educating customers about the importance of safety. Volvo revealed the safety problems with existing cars and expressed the critical need to address safety. Then the automaker showed how its cars were best suited to provide safety and peace of mind.

Witnessing the success Volvo was having with its strategy, competitors tried to get into the safe-car market segment … but with little time to respond, the competition’s primary message became, “We have safe cars, too!” It was too little, too late. Volvo was already No. 1 and owned the market segment. The other car companies’ efforts only served to reinforce the Swedish automaker’s position as the market leader. Fifty years later, Volvo is still thriving and is the No. 1 choice when it comes to safe cars.

Questions to Consider

• Forget better; where are we first?
• What is our unique value proposition?
• What is the problem only we can solve?

Hurdle No. 3: Lack of Trust

With the ability to capture customer attention and make the competition less relevant, you’re at the halfway point to product-launch success. The third hurdle to jump: lack of trust. Customers may understand the problem you solve and why you’re unique, but they don’t act because they simply don’t believe in the offer. This hurdle is probably the most important. Anyone can make a promise, but no one purchases without trusting the product. Moreover, in this age of fake news and skepticism, it takes a lot of work to successfully earn the customer’s trust.

To build trust and establish credibility, B2B companies must teach. They must provide valuable information and confidently educate uninformed prospects. Show prospects that you understand their problem better than anyone and educate them about the ways your company can solve their urgent problems. Also, highlight why your company can be a resource when future problems arise. This is particularly effective because teaching forms a bond with the audience; it builds trust and establishes your credibility. VMware is a great illustration of this point, too.

When the company discovered the server opportunity, their CEO at the time, Diane Greene, didn’t start with demonstrations. Rather, she educated corporate IT professionals about their server problems. She helped bring to light an issue that IT professionals didn’t realize they had. Greene went on a quest to educate the market. She spoke on stage, published content, and delivered seminars—and not about VMware products, but about customers’ server problems. She focused her efforts toward making corporate IT professionals realize that servers were expensive, challenging to maintain, and vastly underused. By educating the market, she earned the trust of her customers.

Questions to Consider

• How can we educate the market about the unique problem we can solve?
• How can we change the way clients think?
• What does our market erroneously believe to be true?

Hurdle No. 4: Inaction

The last major hurdle to product-launch success is inaction. After all the efforts you’ve put forward, the last thing you want is for customers to remain passive. But how do you get clients to act and take the first steps toward you?

At this point, the education strategy addressed in Hurdle No. 3 becomes doubly useful. Along with helping build trust and establishing credibility, it also provides a user-friendly offer. By educating customers about their problem before promoting the product, you’ve made it easier for customers to take that first step. Learning something requires much less commitment by the customer—typically just a name and email address rather than a meeting or full-blown demonstration (both of which can be intimidating and uncomfortable). This strategy allows people to move at their own pace and progress gradually on their journey as they evolve from prospects into customers.

Successful software companies understand that prospective customers who visit their website may not be ready for product pitches or demonstrations. These visitors may be in the earlier stages of their buying journey, so companies offer free educational materials, videos, success stories, and other resources focused on the key problems its products solve. To access these resources, visitors provide their name and email address.

This strategy allows these software companies to establish ongoing communications with early-stage buyers (and influencers), and nurture relationships by supporting them with relevant information and insights along their evolving buyer’s journey.

Questions to Consider

• Do we have a user-friendly first step for clients to take?
• Are clients forced to talk to a salesperson or book a demonstration to engage with us?
• Do we offer access to information that helps clients solve their problem?

The Path to a Successful Launch

Whether it’s a lack of resources or product launch expertise, or perhaps a concern for credibility and reputation, the last thing product professionals need is another hurdle in their race toward product launch success. Four simple—yet crucial—principles can support your company’s efforts to successfully bring products to market as well as improve your chances of being in the 5% of products that succeed.

B2B marketers looking to perform a more in-depth self-diagnosis of their product launch readiness can access a free online Product Launch Scorecard. This scorecard provides a readiness score to help B2B companies make good use of their financial resources and spend time working on the right things for their product launch: multiplying product launch results without increasing expenses.

The post Overcoming the Four Hurdles to Product Launch Success appeared first on Pragmatic Institute - Resources.

Modern marketers have a myriad of choices-both print and digital-when it comes to sales collateral and tools. But are your current tools properly aligned with your buyer’s journey and the way customers want to do business today? Besides your basic set of sales tools-brochures, product data sheets, sales presentation decks-how do you know which additional tools to prioritize?

You’ll learn about the changing paradigm in B2B customer relationships and why these shifting sales dynamics require marketers to rethink how, what and when they communicate to their customers.

Rod Griffith, president of MarketReach, Inc., discusses:

• An effective process that maps sales collateral and tools with the buyer’s journey so that you can focus on the best way to accelerate your sales cycles
• How to develop the right content for the right audience
• Common mistakes to avoid when you develop sales tools to reach C-suite executives

Rod also identifies some sales tools that have the most impact and sections of the buyer’s journey where they will be most effective.

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