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Building the Foundation for Solutions Success in Europe 6 October 2005—Technology companies face many challenges in making the transition from selling discrete products and services to offering integrated solutions. These challenges, often shared by companies across the board and around the world, include re-educating the sales force, rethinking customer communications, and defining appropriate metrics. European companies (or divisions), however, frequently grapple with several additional, European-specific challenges to solutions success, including:
First, European marketers are tasked with bringing a global portfolio of repeatable offers to market. But the level of buyer sophistication varies from country to country, and awareness of each local culture is therefore key. At a recent marketing roundtable ITSMA held in Germany, most participants indicated that they had developed a solutions council or equivalent group to make investment and localisation decisions. BearingPoint, for example, uses its solutions council to set the strategic direction for solutions activity, prioritise investment decisions, manage operational issues, and resolve any delivery or customer issues. Although there is still debate about how best to structure this type of council, in Europe there's a preference for industry verticals to take the lead in attempting to find some commonality across geographic boundaries. Within this overall portfolio management issue, the question arises as to where offer development should take placein the field versus centrally or globally. On this topic there is a consensus that the best one-off solutions are inevitably developed in the field with specific clients in specific verticals and geographies. If there is one accelerator for solutions growth that is guaranteed to help across Europe, it's hiring local experts from the industry vertical you are targetingthat way you have the insight into both the customer's culture and business in which you need to take a more "outside-in" approach to solutions. BT, like many other companies, does this by hiring experts from within specific customers' industries—caring less about the experts' understanding of technology than their knowledge of industry dynamics. The company then leverages this expertise by conducting detailed situation reviews to identify the emerging issues within an industry, drilling down to see how these issues impact individual customer accounts. Another critical issue for marketing solutions across Europe is alignment among marketing, sales, and the business leaders. Regional or global marketers may propose solutions campaigns, but ultimately it is the business and sales leaders within a specific country who prioritise where they invest their time for the best local results. The partner ecosystem can also play a very important role in solutions selling in Europe. This whole area is relatively underdeveloped in most companies today, but it will receive more attention in the near future, with dashboards being constructed for the countries and sets of customers the partners want to jointly target. Capgemini is a great example of a company designing and delivering solutions with partners. Using its "collaborative business experience" positioning to guide its thinking, the company partnered with Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft to design and take what they termed "extended retail solutions" to market, letting the company with the best relationships with each target customer take the lead in selling the new solution. Solutions companies in Europe face some unique challenges in developing and marketing their solutions, but most are navigating the difficulties quite well, and much exciting progress is being made! ITSMA would like to thank Dagmar Fischer of Hewlett-Packard for her support in organising and hosting the European solutions roundtable. —Bev Burgess, info@itsma.com |
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