You have built something that works. Perhaps it is a business capability that makes your own team far more productive, or a toolkit you have refined over years of delivering services, and you suspect other service providers would pay good money to use it. Done right, turning it into a digital product can grow your business and let you sell into territories you cannot staff.
“How do I get there?” I hear you ask. Here is the route up.
Basecamp – What makes it a product?
Before you put your toolkit on the market, be clear what counts as a product. A product is anything, physical, digital or intangible, that gives a customer value in exchange for something of value in return. That is a broad definition, particularly when “customer” can mean someone inside your organisation or someone outside it who buys from you.
This piece is about the toolkit that could serve someone outside your organisation. Products for internal use can be very valuable, especially in a large company where an efficiency scales into big returns, but they are a different subject. If yours could deliver value to an outside customer, it is worth working out whether you can take the next step and sell it.
Camp 2 – Is your capability a product?
Ask the product owner (even if that is you) three questions:
- Does your capability or toolkit give a potential user a clear improvement over what they see as current best practice?
- Does it deliver real, measurable value?
- Would a potential customer who knows the market consider it innovative?
If the answer to question 1 is no, focus on something else. If the answer to question 2 is no, it delivers no measurable value and is not ready to sell yet. If the answer to question 3 is no, you may still be able to create innovation through your go-to-market, so keep going. If you answered yes to all three, you have an innovative product with commercial potential. Pack your things, we’re off on the climb.
Camp 3 – The act of productising
Your toolkit has grown over time, and next to the gold dust your customers will love there is probably a bunch of fluff. Sorting through it and paring down the non-core functionality into something well defined, easy to use and clearly marketable is central to your success. If you can answer “Will it make someone money, or save them money or time?” and “How?” simply and clearly, customers will believe you and you will make sales.
The second part is making the product easy to use. Chances are you built your toolkit in a rather “charismatic” way (some might say “idiosyncratic”). That worked while you were in it every day and had used it from the start. A new customer trying to find their way around and reach the value you promised will struggle.
Make value arrive in the first session, through an experience a newcomer can find their way around. Buyers of B2B software now expect the self-serve experience they get as consumers, and crappy UX will cost you.
The third part covers how you deal with customers, before and after the sale. Take the buying lifecycle in order.
Start with a narrative. It is the easiest way to present your product to the market and to guide customers towards a purchase. Include your origin story, because you are the reason the product exists and you are “user 0”. Something as simple as “We had this problem or opportunity, we solved it by building this product, and you can too” goes a long way towards sales.
Use the same narrative in the demonstration or trial. A few clearly articulated use cases, or user stories, shown in action will turn an interested prospect into an engaged, qualified opportunity. They also ground your demos in the needs of the customer, and not in the preferences of your engineering team.
A smooth purchase and onboarding is the first advertisement for the next sale. Make both as frictionless as you can and customers become advocates, which opens the way to upselling. If you have done things right up to that point, upselling is the easiest selling there is.
Then look after what happens once the customer has bought. R&D and customer support must not be lost, least of all in a SaaS world where customers can churn, even in B2B. Support and continued R&D are part of the value proposition for someone paying you every day, month or year. Delivering there reaffirms the customer’s choice, and gives them a place to tell you what future success looks like for them.
Summit – The channel as your product’s amplifier
This is probably one of your first products, so you do not have a large direct sales team or a fully built eCommerce platform. A capable, engaged channel partner community fills that gap.
Just as you need your ducks in a row to market to end customers, you need to present the value proposition and the tools for success to any reseller or integrator. Done well, it gives you a salesforce with the expertise and the customer connections to amplify your sales far beyond what you could hire.
You will not reach every customer on your own. Even large media technology software vendors find it hard to cover regions as different as Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the APAC region and the Americas. Working with strong, engaged partners in high-value territories multiplies your chances of getting in front of the customers who need your solution.
Build the partner model once, then reuse it. A scalable go-to-market lets you grow without growing costs at the same rate, and a scalable channel partner model does the same for selling through partners. Set up a repeatable way to train, engage, plan with and incentivise partners, and you will spend your time talking about upcoming sales opportunities instead of trying to win back lost attention. We can help with that part.