Launching a new business solution always involves risks. The secret to a successful launch is managing those risks and turning them to advantage. Critical risks include not understanding market needs, inability to secure sufficient and timely resources and ineffective communication of the solution’s value to the target audience. These risks and their mitigation need to be managed from the first inception of the solution. Competitors have these same risks. The company that does a better job of managing is more likely to win in the market.
What is needed is a process that enables solution teams to correctly prioritize solutions functions, efficiently utilize company resources, leverage partners, develop and target market messages. The process needs to be based on good knowledge of the market, customers and other solution providers.
Solution optimization is a methodology that analyzes potential solutions and develops a roadmap to produce an optimal solution development, partnering and marketing plan. For complex solutions the advantage of using a technique such as solution optimization is it allows the solution manager to determine how best to use company resources and how to augment these resources with those of potential partners in the market. By using partners wisely, a solution manager can share the risk, minimize company resources and shorten the overall launch schedule.
Solution optimization uses inputs from the markets such as customer value proposition sought, buying criteria, and market characteristics. Market characteristics examples include the window of opportunity, customer buying habits, the market’s size and growth rate.
Any complex solution is composed of multiple elements, often requiring vary different capabilities. As an example, in today’s networked world, almost all solution have a networking element in addition to the prime solution function. To fully understand all the elements of a solution, a value chain is developed and for each element, the participating companies are listed below the elements. An analysis then takes place for highly ranked value propositions and buying criteria for each of the participants in the marketplace.
The output is an analysis that shows which participants are best positioned on each of the criteria and an action plan to produce an optimal solution. This action plan could result in specific partnerships, acquisitions, or increase resources to develop internal capabilities. It examines the value chain, the buying criteria and the customer values sought, to determine which control points should be developed with internal resources versus using outside partners. A common output is a web of partners that both strengthen the solution and mitigates the risk across this web.
In order to get a complete solution view, the workshop should include participants from marketing, development and sales at a minimum. An important result of this workshop is that the team gets a good understanding of the strengths and weakness of the proposed solution as well as a view of how it compares to competitors. For sales, they typically come away with a much deeper understanding of the solution.
Experience has shown that if the inputs are based on good market research the results are both more accurate and the resulting solution is more likely to be successful. Too often solution teams try to envision market needs in a biased way and market research helps correct this.
This methodology and workshop has been used extensively for solutions spanning all industries. It has been effective both for new solutions in established markets and for new business areas. In addition to helping solutions providers focus on the correct function points, by anchoring the process and thus the solution on customer value, it also provides the path to developing good, target market messages. When the workshop is performed with solution partners present, it helps determine the roles of partners versus solution provider and minimizes conflicts.
Author Resource:-
John Wolff is an expert on new business development, marketing solutions, optimization and wireless communications. His knowledge and advice have helped companies around the globe. Find John on the web at: https://sites.google.com/site/johnwolff/home.
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://www.articlecamp.com/images/icon_Rss.png "XML Feed For RSS"){kind=icon}
Category Rss Feed
Print This Article
Add To Favorites
