Solution Marketing Step 2: Customer options
Once you have defined all of the elements of the customer’s solution, now you can go to step two: defining all of the various options for how the customer might choose to buy the solution. Remember this is not what you are offering (yet) it is simply considering the various ways that customers buy.
DIY: Do It Yourself. This is the person or organization who goes to Home Depot, buys tools and materials, and builds it themselves. Some do it for the fun of it, some to save money in their minds, or others because they believe that what they want is not commercially available.
WBIFY: We Build It For You: This is the person or organization who wants a general contractor to build it for them — whether it is a house or an IT system. They basically want to purchase a completed solution, sometimes called “turnkey” and don’t want to deal with the details of assembling and integrating all the parts.
WRIFY: We Do it For You: This is the person or organization who wants someone else to run the entire process. It is the consumer who hires a lawn service instead of buying a lawn mower. It is the business that outsources payroll operations or any other process rather than do it themselves.
In today’s economy, there are numerous variations of these themes. It is useful to segment the various ways in which a customer might create a solution.
