Solution Selling
Solution Selling is the most complex form of reactive or customer needs-based selling. It is defined as ‘the ability to craft for customers a complete, high-level and complex solution to meet a customer business need where the way forward for the business has already been determined by the customer’.
Often the customer is still without clarity as to how he will move forward – solution selling provides the “how.” Solution selling develops answers to meet complex customer needs and sometimes incorporates the offerings of others, where appropriate. The solution selling premise is that customers may know in principle what they need, but they may not have all the capabilities to pull a solution together and deliver a high-impact business outcome.
With the aims of:
1) Working with the customer to design both a solution to a business level problem, but also to define the business outcome, usually in financial terms.
2) Creating an opportunity to establish a long term relationship with a customer at senior levels within the business, opening the door to a possible Key Account relationship.
3) Establishing own company as a significant business partner with senior business level people within the customer
Candidates for Solution Selling require a range of capabilities to perform this role including the ability to:
- Identify customer needs at main board or senior business manager level early in the buying cycle
- Determine how the need could be fulfilled
- Analyse and quantify the business value that the proposed fulfilment approach would offer to the customer
- Specify what actions and resources would be required to fulfil the need, by when
- Source resources and capabilities required to meet the need
- Enlist partners where own organisation is missing capabilities
- Oversee development of the solution
- Deliver the business proposition to the customer’s senior management and other key stakeholders
- Close the sale
