The Challenge: Our client, a major provider of high-technology equipment to the health care market, was experiencing decreasing sales of its flagship equipment product line because of aggressive competitors, and a stalled product development process. The new business leader wanted to tackle this problem by becoming a solutions provider to its customers. This executive and her team asked Blue Canyon to help them define the path toward achieving that goal.

Assessment: Blue Canyon’s systematic approach involved getting our client’s customer to write the plan. To that end, we developed a systematic framework to help understand the customer chains that existed in the health care markets served by this customer. In the hospital market, for example, we found three major customer constituencies who were interested in “solutions” – technical practitioners, business managers, and the end customers on the medical staff. We conducted interviews with all three customer clusters, developed insights into their issues and concerns, and developed several solutions concepts.

Strategic Solution: We found numerous instances in which these customer constituencies were not aligned, which was likely to thwart possible solutions offerings. Other solutions offerings seemed to have solid potential for contributions to all three clusters. Ultimately, we identified two offerings that had high potential, and were able to identify and beta test target customers from among those that we had interviewed. Working closely with our client, we developed a plan to take these ideas to this group of targets to ensure their interest.

Results: Both of the concepts our client tested were accepted by the targeted customers, and implementation plans were agreed upon between our client and their customers. One of the two concepts proved to be a huge success in solving some very real problems faced by the hospitals. As a result, this client has redefined its offerings to embed the concepts included in this solutions package within their core Go-to-Market Strategy.