Continuous Growth
business solution is all about customer outcomes. The key to defining a solution is to use the customer’s vocabulary. That way everyone understands it.
There are five key components to defining a business solution.
Target customer — who is the solution for?
Job task — what’s the customer doing?
Ideal outcome – the ideal outcome of completing this job task.
The goal — why is the outcome valuable to the customer?
The obstacles — what’s preventing successful completion of the job task and why do those obstacles exist?
In conversation, someone might ask, “What’s on our roadmap?” Your business solution response might go something like this: “We’re going to help health plans identify members for high risk health issues before the symptoms occur.” It saves the health plans money and keeps members healthier at a lower cost.
Internally you may refer to it as an analytics solution but the verbiage in your marketing materials or on a web page should be in the form of a bold headline such as, Find High Risk Members Before Symptoms Occur.
So much of solution definition and solution marketing is just saying what the customer is already thinking. If you think like them, you must be brilliant, right?Remember: the products or features that form the business solution are the HOW part of the equation. The definition of the business solution is the WHO, WHAT & WHY components.
If you want to learn how to build, market or sell higher-value business solutions, sign up for a product management, product marketing or product demo course.