Productizing for Growth
So, you’ve created a novel, effective and super productive business capability and wonder if you might be able to market it outside of your organisation. Or you might have spent years building a toolkit for your services delivery that you think other service providers might pay you good money to use.
Well, if you do it right, such a digital product might just be the way for you to grow your business and reach many more potential customers on a global scale.
“How do I get there?” I hear you say. Let’s take the journey…
Basecamp – What Makes it a Product Anyway?
A product is anything — physical, digital or even intangible — that provides value to ‘customers’ in exchange for something of value in return. That’s a pretty broad definition particularly when you read ‘customers’ as either internal customers (within your organisation) or external customers who you can sell your product to. Building products for internal use can be a very valuable undertaking, particularly if you work in a large company where efficiencies can scale to deliver incredible returns… but that is not the type of product that we are focused on here. But if your fantastic toolkit or super-efficient business capability can provide value to someone outside your organisation then it’s worth analysing whether you can take the next step towards taking that product to market.
Camp 2 - Identifying Whether Your Capability is a ‘Product’
To determine whether a business capability or toolkit ‘turned’ digital product has a market outside your organisation, ask the product ‘owner’ (even if it is yourself) three questions:
Does you business capability / toolkit provide the potential user a clear improvement over what is seen as current best practice?
Does the business capability / toolkit deliver real, measurable value?
Would a potential customer who is aware of the current market consider this ‘product’ innovative?
If the answer to question 1 is no, focus on something else.
If the answer to question 3 is no, you might still be able to create innovation through your go-to-market, so it is worth continuing the process.
If you’ve answered yes to all three of these questions, then you have an innovative product — something that has market / commercial potential. Pack your things, we’re off on the climb.
Camp 3 – The Act of Productizing
Likely your services toolkit or developed business capability has been built over time and contains a bunch of fluff sitting alongside the potential gold dust that your customers will love. The act of sorting through the fluff, pairing down the non-core functionality into a well-defined, innately usable and clearly marketable product is central to your success.
If you can answer the core questions “Is it going to make someone more money or save someone money / time?” and “How?” in a clear and simple way then customers are going to believe you and you will make sales.
The second part of productizing is the act of making the product user friendly. Chances are that you have built your toolkit is a rather ‘charismatic’ way (some might say ‘idiosyncratic’). That probably worked for you when you were in it every day and had used it from the start, but it will not work for a new potential customer trying to find their way around and unlock that promised value.
Creating an intuitive user experience where value is delivered from the very beginning is an absolute key to success and is very often forgotten, particularly in B2B software products. In a world of consumer software where Product Led Growth (PLG) reigns supreme and customer experience is everything, crappy UX in B2B software will just not cut it anymore.
The third part of productizing revolves around customer interactions and the ways that we deliver for the customer, be that pre or post sale. Let’s work our way through the customer buying lifecycle…
Building a strong narrative around your product is the easiest way to both present your product to the market and to guide your customers product journey. That narrative can and should include your journey, your origin story because you’re the reason for the product’s existence and you are ‘user 0’. Whatever your story, creating a simple, compelling narrative – “We had this problem / opportunity, and we solved it or took advantage of it by creating this product. And you can too!” will go a long way to making sales.
That same narrative can be used to guide the demonstration/trial stage too. Creating a few clearly articulated use cases - or user stories - with demonstrations of the solution in action will take an interested potential customer to an engaged qualified opportunity. It will also ground your demo processes in the needs of the customer, not your engineering team.
Next, the processes of purchasing and implementing the product are two of the most underrated advertising opportunities in the whole customer journey. Creating as close to a frictionless experience as possible will make customers advocates for sure and smooth the way for additional upselling (which, if you have done things write up until now, is the easiest form of selling).
Lastly, focus on those post-sale areas of the productization endeavour – R&D and customer support) must not be lost…particularly not in a S-a-a-S world where customers can churn – even in a B2B context. Support and continued R&D are an essential part of the value proposition for someone who is paying for your service each and every day/month/year. Delivering value in these areas reaffirms the customer’s choice to buy your product and provides a platform for engagement where your customers can tell you what future success looks like for them.
Summit - The Channel as Your Product’s Amplifier
Let’s be honest, if you are following this journey to productize your toolkit or business capability, chances are this is one of your first products being brought to market and therefore you don’t have a burgeoning direct sales team or fully built out eCommerce platform to market your product to potential customers. That’s where a capable and engaged channel partner community comes in. And, just as you need to have your ducks in a row to market your product to your end customers, you equally need to be able to present the value proposition and tools for success of your solutions to any potential reseller or integrator. Doing this well will harness a salesforce with expertise and the customer connections to amplify your product sales potential to a far greater extent than what you could reasonably expect to hire in the form of sales people. Even the larger manufacturers of media technology software struggle to reach all of the possible customers throughout often very disparate regions such as Europe, Middle East & Africa, the APAC region or the Americas. By working with strong and engaged channel partners in high value territories you can multiply your chances of getting your product in front of customers who need your solution.
Finally, just as creating a scalable go-to-market is essential to being able to grow without the commensurate costs, creating a scalable channel partner model is essential to getting the most out of selling through partners. Creating a compelling and also repeatable method to train, engage, plan with and incentivise partners means that you will be able to spend your time having positive discussions about upcoming sales opportunities rather than trying to regain your partners’ lost attention. Just like all of the above, we can help with that 😉
Some of the media world’s leading products came out of an internal ‘itch’ for which someone built a solution that would scratch. And, while not every internal tool will be a successful, saleable product, following the right map to productizing your solution can lead you to a very successful and very rewarding outcoming indeed.