Generate demand for your advanced services

The capability to generate demand is critical to monetising your (new) advanced services successfully. This goes beyond good web pages, brochures, and salespeople. It's all about guiding your (potential) clients through their buying journey, providing the right information and insights at the right time and developing their engagement.

The problem – most customers are not fully aware

Customers will only have interest in your company and services if they recognise how it will solve their problems and make their lives easier.

And here is the challenge: your clients may not recognise:

• The opportunities they have.
• What is holding them back from pursuing these opportunities.
• How they can overcome these obstacles.
• How your services fit in.

So why would they be interested in your services that solve the problems they are unaware of? And if your salespeople still try to sell it, why should they be willing to pay for it?

This is a vital challenge for many service providers, holding them back from monetising and growing their services.

Many service providers miss the required capabilities and capacity for service marketing.

The solution: develop your customers' interest in talking to sales

Guide your (potential) customers through their buying journey

Roughly, we can divide your customers' buying journey into 3 phases.

Becoming problem-aware

• (Potential) customers:
  Investigate their opportunities and challenges because something caught their attention. This could be an issue they encounter, an insight from their customers, competitors, partners, or peers or good marketing from a service provider (you?).
• Service marketing can offer:
  Short articles (and videos), infographics, and quick self-assessment tools.

Becoming solution-aware

• (Potential) customers:
  Have identified their "problem" and decided this problem indeed has priority.
  Investigate their options.
  Decide the type of solution and what external support the need – if any.
• Service marketing can offer:
  Longer articles (and videos), webinars, ebooks, and guides about solutions.
  Comparisons of 2 or more different types of solutions.

Becoming provider-aware

• (Potential) customers:
  Know what service they need and now must choose a provider.
  Investigate the differences between alternative providers.
• Service marketing can offer:
  Demos, case studies, FAQ, reviews, testimonials.

All phases are relevant for service marketing because:

• Customers tend to engage with salespeople later in the process, as they can do quite a lot of research via the internet and their network.
• Marketing can educate and inform (potential) customers at scale, reaching much more (potential) customers effectively and efficiently.

Capture information from (potential) customers

An important objective of marketing is to capture (behavioural) information from your (potential) customers, such as:

• Usage of their equipment.
• Consumption of your marketing content.
• Participation in your marketing events (webinars).

A good way of doing this is to ask your (potential) customer for some information in a form, before providing the requested information.

With this information, you can:

• Personalise marketing content.
• Send the right information, related to the phase of their buying journey.
• Identify potential customers who are ready to talk with (service) sales.

Qualify (potential) customers for sales follow-up

There are several ways to signal customers that should be ready to talk with (service) sales:

• You recognise specific patterns or conditions with the equipment.
• An increase in consumption of your marketing content, particularly content for the solution-awareness and provider-awareness phase.
• Your (potential) customer simply asks for a conversation, either via your website, an email or personal contact.

Build a Service marketing team

All these marketing activities will only fly if there is some level of dedication to service marketing.

Some companies have a (small) dedicated service marketing team.
Some have a few service champions in the overall marketing team.

Experiences and insights from your like-minded peers

The past Service Transformation Summit on How to Monetise Advanced Services was ideal for discussing this with your peers.

Participants received:

• 4 high-quality presentations from your peers.
• Extensive and in-depth discussions.
• Post-summit report from the presentations and discussion.

You can find post-summit material on the Summit website.