Solution Selling

Most sales organizations have felt for years the strong imperative to move their sales people, account managers and CRM's away from a traditional strategy in which they focus primarily on providing an individual product or service.

As products become increasingly commoditised, companies are seeking something not so easily imitated: the ability to sell a tailored solution or a set of products and services that meet a unique need within the target company.

The potential benefits of this strategy are very real:

• Your people move higher up the decision making chain and now have a reason to interact with higher-level executives;
• You can create more competitive differentiation by providing a unique Total Business Experience – going beyond product selling with a value-added service to contributing to business and organisational goals of the customer;
• You develop closer and potentially longer-lasting relationships with customers;
• You can ultimately pursue greater top-line growth due to a higher ongoing share of your customer's "wallet";
• You take price out of the equation as what you are providing is a unique solution which can’t be compared to competitors products and services (and lower prices).

Knowing that these benefits exist has made it all the more frustrating for the many companies that still struggle to make solution selling work for them. Solution selling requires a much more strategic view of the seller/customer relationship. The deepest value now resides not in your products or services themselves but in the relationship with the customer, and in the manner in which you can demonstrate through that relationship how you meet a real business need.

"How are you helping me solve my problems? How can you help me increase the business value of what I'm doing? Can you help me justify the value of this purchase to my boss? Can you link what you're selling to my overall shareholder value? Give me something that is greater than the sum of the parts of what you're selling me." These are now the questions driving sales strategy.

Workshop Benefits