Continuing on the theme of the “Future of IT Sales” there was one thing which became abundantly clear during all my conversations with sales leaders — everyone sells ‘solutions’ yet defining what that really means was inconsistent at best. It was used when talking about an individual product all the way to a more complex, pre-integrated bundling of multiple products (sometimes from multiple providers). Exacerbating the problem even further is when a sales manager wants to change the behavior of its sales force and pushes them to sell solutions, yet pays them (sometimes very well) for selling just products. The clear disconnect between what solutions actually mean to a provider versus a customer seems to be getting wider.
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The original solution selling methodology was founded in 1983 by Mike Bosworth and was built on “the basis of sellers selling ‘expert to non-expert’. It was intended to change the focus from the features of the product to the situational use by the customer to solve previously unsolved problems”. Now to be totally fair, his original premise was this worked when selling ‘disruptive technologies’ –however, its application has become so broad that it has lost some of its impact. Today, solution selling has been one of the de facto sales training in the technology space for decades, the term “solution” has come to mean so many things that, in the eyes of the customer, it doesn’t equate to any measurable business value. Fact is, for many IT vendors, “solution” is just another name for a product since the customer or their channel partner actually creates the ultimate value of using a particular technology in combination with other products and services. To even further overuse the term it has now become the standard renaming for the value added reseller (VAR) to “Solution Provider” in the indirect channel – how does that change benefit the customer exactly?
One of the fundamental challenges going forward in building out solution selling organizations is its original premise was that the sale was driven by a ‘non-expert to an expert’ and that is no longer the case. Many sales approaches start from the assumption that the salesperson is the primary source of knowledge and customers rely on sales to educate them on what their ‘solution’ could do for their business. Nowadays, the buyer is in much more control and has knowledge or knows how to get it from sources unmanaged, uncontrolled and unable to be influenced by the seller.
Does a storage device = Disaster Recovery? Or does that device provide a foundation which to build a holistic business continuity ‘outcome’ which a customer understands its business value? Today, customers are looking for business outcomes — ones that can deliver true value and solve key business problems in an integrated fashion. They want to have the flexibility to consume them in multiple ways with results measured and managed via SLAs, metered and paid for by usage or by seat.
But the news is not all bad. Although many sales reps are finding changing their mindset to be extremely difficult, a select group of high performers are proving it can be done. When the average sales rep gets challenged to hit quotas and quarterly sales numbers they default back to whatever will work to get deals quickly thru the pipeline and throw all the other stuff out the window. Whereas these high performers have found a way to not only sell more effectively, but sell differently. They have found the right formula to engage customers in a way they find meaningful and create value far beyond ‘supplying’ their ‘product’ at the best price. The “sellers dilemma’ continues to manifest itself in many ways. And providing customers true business value thru the sales process and beyond is just another example of how challenging it is becoming to be a successful in today’s B2B market.
