How Cross Consulting Services Builds Revenue Strategy From Product-Market Fit

Faulty product-market fit and a lack of revenue strategy are common potholes on the road to success for manufacturers and B2B service providers in the solar-plus-storage industry. 

Product consulting can fill them by providing accurate, unbiased, and customer-centric information about how your solution fits into the market. Product-market fit, in turn, paves the way for revenue strategy that drives sustained growth.

Cross Consulting Services regularly delivers product consulting in partnership with Mayfield Renewables. The engagements enlist subject matter experts and test assumptions about your product and the market. We validate product-market fit, create internal alignment around value, and ensure you’re selling something customers are eager to buy.

But the work also provides a wealth of customer-centric and industry-specific data that, handled correctly, can inform a revenue strategy that’s tailored precisely to your company, your solution, and your ideal customers.

Why is revenue strategy important for solar-plus-storage businesses?

Revenue strategy is a key pillar of every flourishing business. A coordinated plan for maximizing income—one that aligns all revenue-related parts of the business—keeps your marketing and sales activities flowing in the same direction, driving growth.

One study found that tightly aligning sales and marketing can boost customer retention rates by 36% and increase sales win rates by 38%. 

This is especially important for solar-plus-storage businesses: When you’ve developed a sophisticated new monitoring software or cutting-edge energy storage system, it can be tempting to think the solution will sell itself. 

But the industry is growing so fast that the competition is only getting tougher. Private investment hit a record high of $10 billion in 2022, and installers can now choose between multiple versions of many solar products and services.

If you can equip yourself with a well-defined strategy that coordinates product development, marketing, and sales to drive growth, you’ll be ideally positioned to stand out, win customers, and stay in the game for the long term.

Cross Consulting Services can help: I bring a revenue-focused eye to product consulting engagements and translate product-market fit into strategies engineered for success.

How does Cross Consulting translate product-market fit into revenue strategy?

When Cross Consulting and Mayfield Renewables collaborate on product consulting, we typically determine product-market fit by reaching out to customers and the industry in a series of steps:

• Customer interviews 
• Code compliance review
• Industry stakeholder interviews
• Market and other desk research
• Engineering and technical analysis
• Value proposition and key messaging

I then examine the output from each step through a strategic lens. This involves:

• Processing the information gathered in interviews and research 
• Identifying commonalities and points of differentiation
• Establishing what’s material and what’s not
• Validating or repudiating hypotheses

Once I’ve gained a detailed view of your product, your company, and your customer, it becomes easy to: 

• See the bigger business picture
• Identify the best revenue model for you
• Build a plan to activate that model and generate revenue.

In simple terms, strategic feedback from Cross Consulting looks something like this:

I consider your skill set, your company values, and your product or service—all in the framework of your overall business. I then advise you on how to position your solution in the market, give you the strategy to do that, and provide the tools to set the strategy in motion.

Why is Cross Consulting a strong partner for revenue strategy?

The solar-plus-storage industry is driven by technology and engineering. So an effective revenue strategy must start from a rigorous study of your technology and its application. 

When you pair that technical knowledge with deep industry acumen and strategic thinking, you can produce a very powerful result. 

With 15+ years of experience in cleantech and renewables, and 20+ years of high-level business and revenue expertise, Cross Consulting has all of those abilities. 

My background has given me an incisive understanding of how product, marketing, and sales must come together to drive growth for solar-plus-storage clients. 

It’s about knowing which levers to pull when, and rooting those choices in validated hypotheses, technical detail, and thorough market research.

To get a taste of what this looks like, read how four solar-plus-storage companies benefited from Cross Consulting’s strategic recommendations during product consulting engagements:

Megger: Strategy for a legacy company entering the solar vertical
Tigo Energy: Strategy for a well-known manufacturer in the PV space
Villara Energy Systems: Strategy for a lithium-titanate home battery
Yotta Energy: Strategy to establish an EV innovation

In each case, Cross Consulting tag-teamed the product consulting with Mayfield Renewables and wrapped strategy around the outcomes.

Strategy for a legacy company entering the solar vertical

Even if you’re at the top of your game in one industry, entering a new vertical can be hard. But as a global leader in electrical testing and measurement equipment, Megger knew it had a lot to offer the solar-plus-storage industry.

Our consulting insights pointed to one catalyst that would make Megger a strong partner to its new customers: Educating the industry on the applications of their tools. “This gave birth to the idea of an ambitious project,” says Ahmed El-Rasheed, PhD, Industry Director for Renewables at Megger.

That project is producing an Electrical Testing Standards Guide that will fill knowledge gaps in the solar-plus-storage industry. Mayfield is leading the production of the technical content.

On the strategy side with Cross Consulting, I synthesized the elements of Megger’s business—their vision, what they do, how their products work, what the market needs—and drew strategic insights out of the mixture. 

I’m now using those to define the areas of investment and the sales and marketing activities that we’ll build around the guide.

The document is going to position Megger as an innovator and industry leader. But it’s also the heart of a revenue strategy to drive Megger’s growth in this vertical: 

• It’s the core piece of content on a microsite for renewables.
• It’s the hub of all marketing activities for renewables.
• It’s the spokes of all sales activities for renewables.

Ahmed appreciates the strategic input Cross Consulting is delivering:

Strategy for a well-known manufacturer in the PV space

Tigo Energy is the worldwide leader in Module Level Power Electronics (MLPE). They came to us for product consulting to acquire outside expertise and feedback from the target market. 

The engagement began with a Strategic Audit and now covers multiple projects, including market research and discovery interviews to establish product-market fit and develop campaigns for its EI platform.

Over time, the strategic aspect of the work has increased. As the pool of consulting intel has grown, Cross Consulting has been able to use that knowledge to identify connections and correlations that might suggest a new strategy, position, or marketing campaign.

John Lerch, Senior Director of Global Marketing at Tigo, appreciates the value an ongoing relationship brings to the strategy: “I think it gets better over time because you understand the product, the business, the feedback—all that kind of stuff.”

Cross Consulting’s strategic recommendations have helped Tigo identify revenue pathways that weren’t previously clear: One project “emphasized the sales engineers and support side of things for our business. That was maybe a gap in my understanding. I think in a lot of our software discussions, I’ve zeroed in on the ability to help these installers sell more,” says John.

He adds that another benefit of building strategy on robust product consulting work is that “it puts you in a powerful position to effect change.” 

As John notes, anything to do with branding or campaigns involves a degree of behavior change within the organization.

Strategy for a lithium-titanate home battery

Villara Energy Systems was looking to establish product-market fit for its VillaGrid battery, a residential storage solution that uses a high-performance LTO battery chemistry.

Extensive discovery interviews and technical comparisons with other home batteries provided a detailed picture of the technology, its chemistry, and where it stood in the market. This picture also informed my strategic recommendations.

As a startup fairly new to the industry, Villara had to win the trust of contractors and end-consumers for its premium-priced product. Cross Consulting noted that building brand recognition would be crucial to helping Villara compete with leading home battery providers. 

The strategic recommendations covered three steps:

• Invest in promotional materials to educate consumers and build credibility.
• Leverage the battery’s brand-name cells to showcase bankability. 
• Use direct product comparisons to prove product features.

Another strategic element emerged from the technical findings: The battery was well-suited to colder climates. This led to a fruitful shift in strategy: “We’ve had more success in the markets that we were told we’d have more success in,” says Garrett Woodroof, Director of Sales at Villara Energy Systems.

Strategy to establish an EV innovation

Yotta Energy came to us as a well-funded startup looking for expertise around their REV product, a rapidly deployable, solar-powered EV charging station.

After conducting discovery interviews, a technical product comparison, and market research, we developed and tested two hypotheses to determine product-market fit. Again, those findings flowed into the strategic recommendations included in the report.

It was clear that Yotta needed to find partners who were interested in installing EV charging stations—but those partners also needed to have the resources to do so. 

I therefore recommended an economic-development strategy that encouraged Yotta to seek out channel partnerships and strategic partnerships.

“We were seeking independent market research from well-respected industry experts to present key findings to our Board,” says Omeed Badkoobeh, CEO of Yotta Energy.

So who’s on your team?

Do you have a strategic partner who combines decades of industry acumen with a keen understanding of solar-plus-storage technology? Who can rapidly process information, identify connective strands, and engineer a revenue strategy that drives your growth?

Cross Consulting can be that strategist. To find out how I can translate product-market fit into a powerful revenue strategy for you, please email me.

As a next step, we can build the bridge to creative campaigns for your product or service: Our agency partners at Crest Creative can take Mayfield’s technical findings and Cross Consulting’s strategic direction, and translate them into compelling visual storytelling for your brand.