In order to address segmentation and answer the question: what am I selling to a given vertical that differentiates my product or service from what I sell to another vertical – I find it is good to talk about the concepts of ‘solution-selling’ (or ‘solution selling’) vs. ‘selling solutions.’
I remember working with one enterprise Software Company evangelizing solution-selling as I was working to expand this organizations brand from an infrastructure company to a “solutions” company. Since I had been an early advocate of (and thoroughly trained in) ‘consultative selling’, the notion of solution-selling was natural for me to embrace. I was very surprised about a year into this position when one of the most respected product marketing directors exclaimed: “Terry, when you talk about solution-selling, I thought you were talking about selling applications.” I then realized that I had some work to do to better explain myself.
Even as late as this past year, I’ve been asked the same question or something close to it – “What is solution-selling?”, “What is a solution?”, etc. Some years ago, it was rumored that IBM was asking similar questions and engaged SiriusDecisions to define a “solution”. A white paper on this topic can be found on the SiriusDecisions website (but you may need to have a subscription).
Here are my thoughts on solution-selling, what a solution is, etc.
Solution-selling is different than selling solutions. Typically, when selling solutions, the prospect tends to think you have an “out-of-the-box application” or something quite close to it. Selling an application can incorporate (and should incorporate) solution-selling concepts but solution-selling does not mean you are selling an application…is this confusing?
Solution-selling occurs when you position your marketing and sales message to address a “business pain” that a prospect is experiencing instead of merely selling technology for technology’s sake. In a good economy, such as what we experienced in the late 90’s, your prospect organizations were enamored with technology and were willing to spend big bucks just to have the latest and greatest technology “toys”. In most cases, it was the IT organization that made the buy decisions. When the .com bomb occurred, we saw the pendulum swing away from buying technology for technology’s sake - to the requirement for organizations to invest in technology when a line-of-business (LOB) executive indicated that he/she needed this technology to solve a strategic (or tactical) business problem. The challenge technology vendors had: convince the LOB executives that your technology could address their business pain. Hence, the language of marketing and selling had to change. This is what we call solution-selling.
So, instead of selling features and functions to IT (who could intuitively understand why a given feature/function was important), we had to sell benefits and return-on-investment (ROI) to the LOB executive. Technology vendors had to ‘talk the talk’ of the business executive. If you were selling technology to an insurance company claims vice president, you needed to talk about claims management and processing. If you were selling to a bank’s mortgage department, you had to talk about mortgage servicing and processing.
Since the beginning of time, technology organizations have been working to execute to a solution-selling approach. Even today when I speak to many software organizations, solution-selling is top of mind.
Here are some links to other blogs/articles defining solution-selling which offer similar points of views. There are also many books available that go into detail regarding solution-selling sales methodologies.
http://businessskeptic.firstrulecorp.com/2007/10/13/solution-selling-defined/
http://www.4hoteliers.com/4hots_fshw.php?mwi=3476
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_selling
Next posting, I will talk about my views on the evolution from solution-selling to selling solutions…..
No comments:
Post a Comment