Sharpen your product offering content

In selling more complex products and services you must dress your product offerings value proposition with several different content elements so you can manage the complete communication effort thru the whole customer journey, from initial marketing initiatives all away to the proposal. When communicating with your clients you need to address them with different content depending on where in the sales process and the customer journey they are in, how mature they are regarding the business challenges your product address and who your stakeholders are. To develop the complete set of content, marketing and sales needs to collaborate. Quite common is that marketing develops the content for the very early stages in the customer journey and sales develop the pitch. By doing so the client might need to rush thru the customer journey without having the chance of maturing and building their knowledge which often results in a no-go decision based on insecurity.

One effective tool for creating the necessary content to support the complete customer journey is the product offering pyramid. A straightforward and easy to use model.

Picture: The Product Offring Pyramid

1.       Insights: The base layer consist of analysis of specific areas and its issues, challenges and potentials that we know are relevant and on top on our client’s agenda and have a connection to our product and/or service features.

2.       Point of view: The point of view bundles set of insights within a focus area that are analysed and described in a relevant dimension. Based on these insights we have created an approach on how to tackle the area of interest.

3.       Offer: A more generic description on how our product or service can support clients within the focus area based on our point of view with proven methods, product features and experiences.

4.       Pitch: A tailored description on how our product or service can support a specific client with its specific challenges and needs.

By developing all the content elements of the pyramid, we can now support the complete customer journey.

Picture: Example of implementation of the pyramid

The picture above is an example on how to put the pyramid to work supporting all phases in a simplified customer journey. A typical flow in the Awareness phase is a post on LinkedIn “the 5 most common challenges…” that markets an article on LinkedIn or the company blog where some interesting insights are described. In the Consideration phase an e-mail marketing initiative invites relevant stakeholders to a webinar where the point of view is presented by highlighting a bundle of insights and an approach with some ideas on how to manage the situation. In the Evaluation phase there usually be a sales meeting where we discuss how to use our product for this specific client, based on our point of view that was developed by having the insights we had discovered in mind.

A few insights and just one rigid point of view might not be enough to fill the pyramid if your product or service has several customer segments and addresses several stakeholders. For example, a technical stakeholder is probably intrigued with a different set of insights than a financial stakeholder. A point of view that attracts stakeholders within manufacturing may not attract stakeholders within retail at the same level. Having your business model up to date is, again, useful as a base for developing your product offering pyramid.

I hope you found this article somewhat interesting and I look forward to your feedback and comments on how you sharpen your offerings to boozt your business.