Anyone working in the B2B arena knows that a consultative sales process is a must. It isn’t enough to sell products and services. You have to sell solutions. Salespeople aren’t merely order takers, after all. They’re problem solvers. Right?
Maybe not. In an era of increasing customer competence as a result of ever-greater access to online research tools, the prospects our sales teams encounter are asking tougher questions. Many have already done a lot of the legwork when it comes to getting educated about the market and its key players, so by the time we come in contact with them, the word “solution” has lost much of its bargaining cachet.
According to a recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, “What was once a meaningful, buyer-defined term that meant ‘the answer to my specific problem’ is now generic jargon that sellers have co-opted to mean ‘the bundle of products and services I want to sell you.’” As a result, customers are increasingly suspicious that our “solution” may not be rooted in an accurate understanding of their problems.
Perhaps it’s time to rethink our “solution sales” mindset, then. Do we really need to retire the word “solution” from our business vocabulary—as the authors of the MIT article suggest? Or might there yet be a way to redeem it? Before making any rash decisions, let’s start by asking ourselves three important questions about our sales approach:
Question #1 – What are our customers’ real pain points?
Our prospects are doing advance research on us and our offerings, so it stands to reason that we should be doing preemptive research on them and their pain points. If we want to win their trust, we’ll need to cultivate broad industry expertise and demonstrate our ability to be fluent “conversation partners” in an evolving marketplace where sellers are expected to function as collaborative partners rather than mere purveyors of products and services.
As salespeople, then, we ought to be regularly reading top trade publications to stay abreast of current industry news, disruptive technologies, and potentially influential political developments. We should be active in online forums where industry practitioners discuss their problems and celebrate their victories, too. Anything that helps us keep a pulse on the goings-on in our various fields of specialization simultaneously improves our ability to detect and address evolving marketplace dynamics that are impacting how our prospective customers do business.
In the B2B arena, it also pays for us to take a deep dive into the needs of our customers’customers. We do well to investigate the kinds of problems they’re facing, the kinds of lifestyle decisions that fuel their buying behavior, and the role our customers play in alleviating those problems. Why? Because the better we understand how the final customer perceives value, the better we’ll be able to appreciate how our customers define success, and the better we can anticipate the kinds of problems that they have to overcome in order to make their customers happy.
Of course, there’s plenty we won’t be able to learn until our relationship with a particular customer has begun, but if we’ve done our homework up until that point, prospects are more likely to open up to us about their operational struggles and desired business outcomes. It’s at this point that asking strong, open-ended questions is vitally important, too—questions that are designed more to elicit a better understanding of our customer’s business than to uncover opportunities to pitch particular features or selling points of our “solution.” Even when we learn relatively little new information during these initial sales meetings, they provide us a chance to demonstrate real humility and genuine interest in being a partner in helping our prospect achieve their goals.
If we’re satisfied that we’re doing our level best to truly understand our customers’ pain points, then we can move on to the next question.
Question #2 – What are we really selling?
Even if we have a pretty good understanding of what our customers need, we may not have a great understanding of what it is we’re trying to sell. That may sound like nonsense at first, but if the MIT authors are correct, then we’ve let the word “solution” become something of a catch-all buzzword to prompt favorable customer response to whatever combination of goods and services we’re offering at the time. That would suggest we’re not doing a good job of communicating howour products solve real customer problems, much less how solving those problems will lead to favorable business outcomes for our customers in the future.
If we’re leaving customers to figure this information out on their own, that’s a serious problem. When we talk about the “solution sales” mindset, we’re really talking about three distinct levels of sales offerings. In order to deliver a consistently high level of customer satisfaction, we’ll need to be sure we’re selling all three of these things as part of the same transaction:
Level 1 – Helpful goods and services
Many of us have been conditioned to call our offerings “solutions,” but if we’re being truly honest with ourselves, we’re simply hawking different packages of goods and services, tangible “stuff” that—we truly believe—offers genuine value to our customers. We earnestly back the quality of our products, the thoughtfulness of their design, and the value-added services we bundle in at no added charge. We’re eager to demonstrate how awesome these products are, fully convinced that our prospects simply can’t resist once he or she sees everything our stuff can do.
Particularly in a world of better-educated consumers, this sort of passion for our “stuff” can help differentiate our brand from the competition. But what we sometimes forget is that a cool product or service, no matter how innovative or value-packed, is rarely what our customers are actually in the market to buy. It may be what they ultimately pay for, but their satisfaction ultimately lies in how it helps to solve their most vexing problems.
Level 2 – Solutions to immediate problems
If we’ve done our homework and listened carefully to our customers, then we probably have a good idea what specific problems they’re trying to solve. We might know, for instance, that a particular manufacturing prospect is considering implementing a cloud-based ERP not so much for convenience of access or data security as for the ability to give salespeople at multiple branch offices real-time updates on inventory availability and current pricing—so that fewer sales are lost on account of delays in follow-up on time-sensitive proposals. This potential customer isn’t merely shopping for an upgraded ERP, in other words; they’re trying to solve a thorny operational problem.
If we’re smart, we’ll have recognized these things early on in the sales process and customized our sales approach to highlight those product features and service options that make our offering a good fit for addressing the customer’s needs. To the extent possible, we’ll have prepared a customized product configuration that is more than just a one-size-fits-all proposition— so that the customer isn’t paying for features or services they don’t need, for instance. But even when such customization isn’t possible, it’s our job to make sure that our customers clearly see how our proposal directly addresses their identified problems. As consultative partners, we’re responsible for bringing our industry and product expertise to bear on helping our customer overcome those problems by implementing our “solution.”
Level 3 – Positive business outcomes
But wait! There’s more… Business solutions and business outcomes are closely linked, but they’re not quite the same thing. Sometimes a particular problem can be overcome, yet the solution may not yield a wholly desirable outcome. Consider, for instance, the manufacturing prospect discussed above. The problem this company wants to solve involves the loss of new orders as a result of delays in obtaining inventory status and current pricing information from an overworked central office staff. Key stakeholders believe that having real-time ERP access will enable salespeople to respond in a more timely manner to customer RFPs, thus netting them more sales and boosting overall productivity for the company’s central office.
But what if the company fails to anticipate the consequences of empowering salespeople to interpret the data contained in the ERP? What if a short-term reduction in procedural delays comes at the cost of an increase in inaccurate information being passed along to customers in sales proposals? Our software may be doing the job it was intended to do, but it won’t be delivering the value they hoped to realize.
As salespeople, we might think our job ends with solving customer problems, but it doesn’t. In order to be good consultative partners, we have to help our customers think beyond the sale to see something of the changed landscape in which they’ll do business after implementing our solutions. Sometimes this may mean anticipating new problems arising from the solution to old problems—and potentially developing value-added services that can be bundled into our package to differentiate us from our competitors on that front. Other times, it might mean drawing awareness to additional long-standing problems are customers are already facing but don’t yet realize our solution can help them address. Perhaps that cloud ERP has barcoding support, for instance, which could create an opportunity for our prospect to implement a stronger inventory control accountability system in the first place—making the data easier for salespeople to accurately interpret for customers.
The possibilities are endless. But the point is that salespeople cannot afford to treat sales transactionally. When we’re talking about “solution sales,” we’re talking about forming a consultative relationship before, during, and after the sales transaction.
Question #3 – How can we close the gap?
A huge source of customer dissatisfaction derives from the gap between our proposed “solution” and the metrics that define our customers’ anticipated business outcomes. “This is becoming the new normal,” explains sales veteran Sherri Sklar: “there’s actually a disconnect between the value we say we deliver and what customers are actually experiencing.”
At this point, we’ve done our best to engage customers and understand their pain points. We’ve done some introspective reflection on what we’re prepared to deliver in the way of a “solution” that can actually lead to positive business outcomes. Perhaps we’ve decided we need to tweak our sales approach a bit. Or perhaps we’ve decided we need to target a different kind of customer in the first place. Or perhaps we’ve even decided we need to get with R&D and work on retooling certain facets of our product. All of those things are possible. But we still need to ask what we can do to ensure that our customers have a consistently positive experience with us in light of what we’ve discovered.
What steps can we take to ensure that our sales process we’re using today will actually deliver on the “solutions” we’re promising, creating positive business outcomes for our customers tomorrow?
Here are a few ideas:
Cultivate greater emotional intelligence among salespeople.
This is a big one. We tend to hire people with strong interpersonal skills to sell our products—people who are good at putting others at ease, making small talk, and persuasively communicating value. Yet what many of our salespeople need is a greater degree of emotional intelligence. They need that “sixth sense” enabling them to detect the real pain points that drive customer behavior but often to go unexpressed. Is the manufacturer’s real problem, for instance, that sales are being lost because of communication delays, or is it that employee morale is taking a substantial hit because of adversarial relationships between central office staff and salespeople out in the field? (Hint: It’s probably both. Wouldn’t you like your people to be able to pick up on which of these two facets is more motivating for the prospect, though?)
The simple fact is that no matter what problems our customers face in their daily operations, these problems create stress in the workplace. The better our salespeople are at recognizing these signs of distress, the better they will be at articulating how our goods and services offer a real solution—in both tangible and intangible terms. So let’s help salespeople become better listeners who can accurately interpret body language, express genuine empathy, and ask good leading questions that elicit “behind the scenes” emotional information from prospects.
Foster relationships—internally and externally—between different outcome stakeholders.
Salespeople can only do so much. If we’re going to create greater alignment between the goods and services we produce and the long-term business outcomes our customers are trying to achieve, then we’re going to need more communication touch-points between key stakeholders at all points along the product development and delivery cycle.
Externally, representatives from our company have to be in constant contact with our customers—and not merely by way of individual salespeople interacting with individual purchasing managers. C-suite executives need to be conversing with leadership at our customers’ organizations between sales so that we can better understand our customers’ vision and goals—and so that this information can inform product development and customer service. We also ought to consider developing friendly relationships with suppliers and vendors who can help provide ancillary value to our customers—or with whom our prospective customers are already working—so that implementation of our solutions creates a more seamless experience for their organizations.
Internally, we need to make sure that bilateral communication is possible and encouraged as part of the sales process. Salespeople ought to spend time getting to know what the customer experience is like after the sale, in terms of contact with our implementation teams, customer service staff, and technical support. That might mean getting out of the office and visiting the shop floor from time to time, or personally showing up to assist with implementation and on-site training. Meanwhile, salespeople ought to be empowered to help personnel at all levels of the organization better understand and appreciate their individual team roles in delivering a high-quality customer experience. The more the organization takes joint ownership of successful outcomes for our customers, the more our customers begin to see us as partners rather than vendors.
Find out how your customers measure success—and make those metrics your own.
What gets measured gets done, as the adage goes. The problem with many of our sales processes is that we’re good at measuring internal metrics, but we’re not necessarily good at recognizing and tracking with our customers’ metrics for success. We might be inclined to measure the extent to which our software reduces communication delays, for instance, but our customer might be watching to see whether there’s a corresponding increase in sales in order to establish the marginal value of investing in our “solution.” It pays, therefore, for us to find out early in the sales process how our customers define the positive business outcomes they’re aiming to achieve (i.e., “at least a 25% reduction in lost sales” or “the ability to meaningfully respond to all sales inquiries within 24 hours”). Once we know how our customers are defining success, we can follow up with them and see how we’re doing. If we’re falling short, we can take action sooner—before the experience turns sour for the customer.
In the final analysis, it’s not so much the word “solution” that is problematic in business jargon; it’s the way we too often use the word as a shortcut for doing our homework. Perhaps it would be prudent for some of us to walk back some of our language on this front, but if we’re doing our best to deeply understand customer pain points, articulate how our products address immediate problems, and cast a vision for how a successful implementation might lead to long-term positive business outcomes, then we’re still selling “solutions”—and we need not be ashamed to say so.
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