The entire focus of my postings to the Product Management Blog will be on helping Product Managers & Marketers improve their strategic impact by becoming more of a driving force behind their company's transition from a product marketing and selling model to a solution marketing and selling model.

So, if your company is not serious about selling solutions, or if you don't think that solutions marketing is any different than product marketing you can skip my posts ...

One of the toughest challenges facing Product Managers and Marketers is creating customer relevant, differentiated, sales ready, & solution centric messaging for complex software products.

This is why the concept of "Marketecture" developed by Pragmatic Marketing in the late 90's is so important. The problem today however, that traditional Problem Statements and Positioning Documents as well as the vision and role of Marketecture needs to evolve.

Today's customers demand true solutions. As a result, software products are becoming more complex, and many are being sold to solve multiple problems, for multiple stakeholders, in multiple markets. This unrelenting pressure sell solutions combined with the increased complexity has spawned a new generation of Marketecture tools that support a more rigorous Value Mapping Process and are built upon a relational and web enabled value and differentiation model.

These new Value Mapping tools will not only help companies do a better job of defining their value and differentiation from the customer's perspective, but they also improve the ability to transfer and share knowledge with the sales organization.

Over the next months I will be blogging on some of the key issues surrounding solution centric positioning and messaging that PMs need to address if they are truly going to increase their strategic impact on their organization