What's Your Edge?
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4 Critical Steps to Keep Your Product from Being Obliterated | What’s Your Edge?
Bringing a new B2B product and/or service (solution) to market is a multifaceted process. At the very minimum it requires a solid understanding of the customer, a compelling value proposition and associated positioning and messaging, an excellent go-to-market (GTM) strategy, and a keen awareness of the competition. Each phase of this process is crucial. Missteps in the process from development to launch to adoption can result in the product being obliterated in a competitive market. If you’ve ever built a sandcastle at the beach, you know to avoid seeing your creation be completely washed out to sea it needs a strong foundation and core structure, well-constructed towers, and defenses against the rising water. This episode of What’s Your Edge? explores four critical steps to successfully create and bring a new B2B solution to market.
1: What Customers Value is the Key to a Solid Foundation
How well a sandcastle survives starts with the foundation. Without a solid base, it will be overwhelmed by the tides. This is also true for a successful B2B solution, which relies on customer insights as its strong foundation. Customer insights are critical for developing and launching a customer-centric product that meets real needs and delivers value.
Here are three basic components for laying a solid foundation:
- Before you start building your sandcastle, choose the right spot—one with firm, wet sand that will hold up. In the business world, this translates to conducting thorough market research to identify where opportunities exist. By analyzing market trends, you can find the areas where customer needs are not being fully met and where your product can make the most impact. Market research provides the context for understanding the broader landscape in which your solution will compete.
- Once you’ve chosen your spot, the next step is to test the sand to ensure it’s stable. In product development, this means diving deep into customer needs, passions, and pain points through interviews, focus groups, and surveys. Understanding what frustrates your customers, what they aspire to achieve, and where they face obstacles allows you to create a product that addresses these issues head-on. This step ensures your foundation is stable and your product is built on a true understanding of the customer.
- If you’re like me, you’ll build a moat to protect your sandcastle from the encroaching tide. Segmentation helps protect your solution from becoming too generalized and losing its appeal. By dividing your market into distinct segments based on specific needs and behaviors, you can tailor your product to meet the precise demands of each segment. This targeted approach ensures your foundation is strong and your product will resonate with the right customers.
IBM provides a good example of a company that laid a strong foundation. For its Watson Analytics, the company conducted extensive market research and customer interviews to understand the unique challenges of enterprise customers—identifying key pain points in data management and decision-making before developing a product that directly addressed those issues. This customer-centric approach enabled IBM to build a solution that stands firm in a competitive market.
2: Your Value Proposition Creates the Core Structure
With a clear understanding of the customer, the next step in product development is to define a compelling value proposition. This phase is similar to shaping the core structure of a sandcastle—the walls, towers, and gates that make it stand out and capture attention. The value proposition answers the fundamental question: What unique value does this product offer to the customer?
Here are four initial thoughts on how to approach shaping the value proposition:
- A clear blueprint outlines what your sandcastle will look like. In product development, this means identifying the key benefits your product will deliver. What specific problems does it solve for the customer? How does it make their life easier or their business more successful? Answers to these types of questions will help you articulate the advantages of your product, much like sketching out the features of your sandcastle before construction begins.
- With your blueprint in hand, you’re ready to start building the walls and towers of your sandcastle—the elements that give it form and structure. In terms of your product, this means directly addressing customers’ pain points. Every feature and benefit needs to connect to a specific challenge, opportunity, or frustration faced by your customers so you deliver a strong and relevant solution that resonates with your customers.
- To make your sandcastle stand out on a crowded beach, you will need to include unique features—perhaps a towering spire or intricate gate. Similarly, your value proposition needs to highlight what sets your product apart from competitors. This could be a unique feature, superior quality, or exceptional customer service. Differentiation is key to ensuring your product doesn’t just blend in but stands out in the marketplace.
- Before you finish building, you’ll want to check that your sandcastle can withstand the elements. This is where you test your value proposition with your target customers. This can be done through pilot programs, beta testing, or gathering feedback on a prototype. Testing ensures your product’s value proposition is not only compelling on paper but also resonates with customers in practice. It’s like making sure your sandcastle won’t crumble at the first wave.
HubSpot illustrates this step. It shaped its value proposition by clearly identifying the key benefits of its inbound marketing platform—helping businesses attract, engage, and delight customers. The company built its product’s core structure by addressing the pain points of traditional marketing methods and differentiated it through a user-friendly interface and comprehensive toolset. Before fully launching, HubSpot tested its value proposition extensively with beta users, refining it to ensure it met customer needs and stood out in the market.
3: Your Go-to-Market Strategy is the Entryway to Your Castle
Once your value proposition is clearly defined, the next crucial step is to develop a GTM strategy. This step is about creating an entryway to your castle that entices and invites attention and signals the castle’s strength and appeal. Your GTM strategy outlines how the product will be introduced to the market and includes traditional elements such as pricing, positioning, sales channels, and marketing tactics.
The entrance to a sandcastle needs to be positioned where it’s most visible and accessible. The same is true for how you position your product. Effective positioning helps ensure your product stands out in a crowded marketplace, drawing customers in through a clearly defined and attractive value proposition. Questions to consider in this phase are: What niche will it fill? What message will resonate most with your target customers?
- gate must be both sturdy and fitting for the overall design—just like your pricing strategy must reflect the value your product offers while being competitive. Pricing strategies can range from premium pricing for high-value differentiated products to competitive pricing aimed at gaining market share quickly. It is important to align pricing with the perceived value of your product and the expectations of your target market.
- For your sandcastle’s entrance to be effective, there must be clear pathways leading to it. In GTM terms, this is about selecting the right sales channels to reach your customers. Whether it’s direct sales, channel partners, online platforms, or a mix, the chosen channels should align with where your customers prefer to buy and how they want to engage with your product. Direct, accessible pathways ensure potential customers can easily find and engage with your product.
- Many people decorate the entrance to their sandcastle with shells or carvings to catch the eye. Marketing tactics are what attract and draw in potential customers. This involves creating campaigns that communicate your product’s value proposition, using various tactics such as content marketing, social media, advertising, and public relations. These tactics should be tailored to your audience’s preferences and behaviors, ensuring they resonate and drive interest.
- Once your sandcastle’s entrance is built, you’ll want to ensure it’s guarded against the tide—much like using data-driven insights to protect your GTM strategy. Analyzing market trends, customer behavior, and competitive positioning allows you to continually refine your strategy. Data helps you anticipate challenges, adjust your tactics, and optimize your approach to ensure your product is well-received in the market. According to McKinsey, companies that use data-driven B2B sales-growth engines report above-market growth and EBITDA increases in the range of 15 to 25%.
Salesforce’s GTM strategy for its cloud-based CRM platform is a classic example of crafting a successful entryway. The company positioned itself as a disruptive force in the traditional software market, chose a competitive pricing strategy that appealed to businesses of all sizes, and leveraged a combination of direct sales and a robust partner ecosystem. Salesforce’s marketing tactics focused on educating the market about the benefits of cloud computing, which helped it gain rapid adoption. The company continually used data-driven insights to refine its approach, ensuring its entrance was well-guarded against competitive pressures.
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4: To Withstand the Tide, You Need to Be Competitive
After launching your product, the final phase is to ensure it withstands the competitive tides—just as a sandcastle must endure the incoming waves. In the B2B space, staying ahead of the competition requires continuous monitoring, refinement, and innovation.
Here’s how to defend your product against the market’s shifting tides:
- To protect your sandcastle, you will need to keep an eye on the rising water. To keep your solution relevant to your customers, you must constantly monitor market conditions. This involves tracking industry trends, economic shifts, and changes in customer behavior. By staying informed, you can anticipate challenges and adjust your strategy accordingly. Regular market analysis allows you to see potential threats before they become critical, ensuring your product remains resilient.
- As the tide advances, you might reinforce your sandcastle’s walls to ensure they hold up. Similarly, gathering and acting on customer feedback helps strengthen your product’s customer-centric position. Encourage customers to share their experiences and insights. Use this feedback to refine and improve your product. Whether it’s enhancing features, improving the customer experience, or addressing new pain points, continuous customer engagement ensures your product evolves with their needs, keeping the walls strong.
- On a busy beach, you’ll notice other sandcastles being built nearby—much like in the market, where competitors constantly make moves. Keeping an eye on competitor actions allows you to respond proactively rather than reactively. This could mean further differentiating your product, adjusting your pricing strategy, or launching new features that set your product apart. Competitive intelligence helps you maintain your edge and ensures your sandcastle stands out in the crowded marketplace.
- To defend against the tide, your sandcastle needs a strong, well-fortified foundation. In business, this translates to operational excellence—streamlining processes, optimizing efficiency, and ensuring quality in every aspect of your product’s delivery. Operational and advantageous excellence help reduce costs, increase profitability, and enhance customer satisfaction by delivering a consistent, high-quality experience. This fortification is crucial for long-term success in a competitive environment.
- Finally, to keep your sandcastle not just standing but growing, you might build new towers or expand its reach. In the B2B space, ongoing innovation is key to maintaining a competitive edge. This involves investing in research and development, exploring new technologies, and continuously improving your product. Innovation keeps your product relevant and ahead of the competition, ensuring it remains attractive to customers and resilient against market pressures.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has successfully defended its position as a market leader in cloud computing by consistently monitoring market conditions, gathering customer feedback, and keeping a close eye on competitors like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. AWS continually fortifies its operational excellence by ensuring top-tier service delivery and investing heavily in innovation, such as AI and machine learning services. This proactive approach has allowed AWS to maintain its competitive edge and grow its market share, much like a sandcastle that not only withstands the tide but continues to expand.
Build and Market Products that Will Endure Competitive Waves
Bringing a new B2B solution to the market is like constructing a sandcastle that can withstand the tides. It takes careful planning, a deep understanding of your customers, a strong value proposition and messaging, a strategic GTM plan, and a constant eye on the competition. Each step is crucial in ensuring your product makes a splash and endures the waves of competition.
Now that we’ve explored the metaphorical journey from laying the foundation to defending against the elements, it’s time to assess your next move. Start by revisiting your customer insights, refining your value proposition, positioning and messaging, and crafting a GTM strategy that leverages data-driven insights. Keep innovating, stay customer-centric, and fortify your operations to maintain your competitive edge.
If you’re looking for expert guidance to help you build and launch your next B2B solution successfully, don’t hesitate to reach out. Let’s work together to ensure your product stands out and stands strong against the tides.