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I can recount hundreds of similar stories from my peers at the time, from teams I have managed through my career, and from clients I have worked with in the past 20 years. Once they saw what I presented, they immediately asked, “What do we do about it, how do we solve that problem?” You know the rest of the story. It was costing them millions in lost productivity–but they were unaware of it until I showed them the data on the impact. I had discovered a productivity problem they were unaware of in processing credit card approvals by phone. I think that’s what I was doing when I sold my first $20M computer system to a credit card processor in the late 70’s. Great solution sales people have always come to the customer with ideas, has identified problems and opportunities the customer has previously been unaware of, has shown them new ways of doing things.Īs the Solution Sales person progresses from helping the customer recognize problems and opportunities and gains their commitment to do something about them, the Solutions Sales person, helps the customer define what they want to achieve, identify their needs–many of which they may be unaware of, and present solutions to those problems or ways to capitalize on opportunities (sounds a lot like a solution).Īt least that’s what I was taught when I went through my first solutions selling class in the late 70’s (it wasn’t called solution selling, but it was IBM’s version at the time). Every program I have participated in, designed, or taught includes the idea that the customer may not know they have a problem or an opportunity and the role of the sales person is to help them recognize this and decide to take action. Anyone who has read extensively in solution selling or taken a quality training program realizes that a major aspect of the Solution Selling approach is to help customers see new possibilities for growing their businesses. That certainly is a part of solution selling (and undoubtedly a part of Challenger selling), it does not define solution selling. I’ve never seen the definition of solution selling being limited to starting with a customer who has identified they have a problem, discover their needs, solve the problem.
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In addition, our company has trained over 100K sales people in solutions/consultative/customer focused selling approaches. I’ve participated in dozens of solutions selling programs over my career, offered by many companies. Well, I’m not sure where they came up with that definition of solution selling. They do this through leveraging resources on the web, displacing the traditional solution sales person’s role, leaving them as RFP fodder. By the time the customer has reached this point, they probably have already determined their own needs and determined solutions to those needs. The sales person then identifies the customer needs, then proposes a solution to those needs. Frankly, they create an artificial definition of Solution Selling, saying Solution Selling starts with a customer who has identified a problem they want to solve. The Challenger Conference Board folks say this is the outdated idea. Yes, I said provide customers solutions to their problems. That’s by helping them identify and solve problems. Instead of this, we should be driving greater clarity in how sales people can create great value for their customers.
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In the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, the folks at the Conference Board have declared “The End Of Solutions Sales.” Upon reading this, I immediately thought of Mark Twain’s quote, “Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.” While, I suppose, it stirs up the pot to declare the end of Solutions Selling and may sell more workshops or consulting services, in the end I think it is wordsmithing and positioning.