By John Mansour
There are plenty of good B2B solutions in the market, but as a percentage there are only a few great ones. What’s the difference between the two? Could it be something as simple as incorporating “what-if” scenarios into your functional requirements and design process?
The good and the great solutions both possess the following elements:
1. A clear business objective for the target customer.
“Marketing Solution X will help car dealers grow revenue more profitably by increasing the volume of non-warranty work in the service department.”
2. Business requirements for each customer department impacted by the solution (e.g., marketing, IT, cashier and service).
“To ensure marketing is creating the most relevant service promotions, a single repository of customer information is necessary to avoid redundancies, improve response rates and eliminate wasted marketing resources.”
3. User Stories that must be considered to satisfy the business requirement.
“As the marketing manager and I want to create an email campaign to increase service volume on Mondays when the workload is lighter to improve our revenue and cost metrics.”
The what-if dimension is the extra layer that occurs after the user stories are written and examines the same work processes for common exceptions. The result is a few more user stories to support the what-if scenarios.
Examples:
- What if a customer has multiple cars serviced at one dealership?
- What if a customer has multiple cars serviced at different dealerships owned by the same organization?
The great Marketing Solution recognizes a single customer with multiple vehicles and makes it easy for a car dealership to market to those customers with relevant messages and offers that demonstrate their appreciation for that loyalty.
The good Marketing Solution associates every vehicle to a customer and sends the same customer multiple redundant emails that result in higher opt-outs, lower response rates, wasted marketing money and ultimately lower service revenue – the exact opposite of what the solution is designed to accomplish.
While the good solution can do almost everything the great solution does, the incremental what-if scenarios in the great solution become a clear point of differentiation that most car dealers would prefer. Result: great solution wins the majority of head to head competitions!
In the B2B world, most great solutions encompass multiple products and services. If your product organization is functioning in silos that inhibit your ability to create great solutions, contact Proficientz and learn how our portfolio management best practices help create high-value, high-impact solutions instead of just creating good products.
John
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