The End of Solution Sales is in the Rearview Mirror. Good News for Salespeople.

Proxima B2B is a company full of very experienced salespeople. We have all been selling technology and professional services for long enough to have been through several waves of what-everyone-knows-is-true-about-solutions-sales. Most of us can quote chapter and verse from Xerox, Hewlett Packard, Pfizer, or a dozen other sales training qualification processes, regimens and systems. 

Give us a chance and you'll likely hear more than interests you about the pros and cons of various sales fads that have swept through companies where we have worked. Each had some good stuff, often buried in 4 inch binders full of pretty useless consultant speak. But there is this one article, that ran in the Harvard Business Review, way back in 2012, The end of Solution Selling that is required reading for new Proxima B2B hires and comes up fairly frequently in discussions when we're putting together sales campaigns for a new client company.

If you can, click on the link and read the article. It isn't MBA final exam dense. It's a simple, straight forward expose of why the model most people use out on the road, at their hard-won sales call, is dead on arrival. 

The punchline, yep I'm giving it to you because I'm betting that unless your flight is late, you don't think you have time for a HBR article, is that since customers can completely spec out purchases, carefully define their own needs, and fill in their knowledge gaps, the last thing they need is a salesperson winging in to ask them all of the questions they've already answered. In short, the salesperson is generally not adding value using "solutions sales" techniques because the customer doesn't need us salespeople to help them through the steps we were taught in all those hotel conference room sales trainings.

But wait, you say, sales can't be dead. Nope. Far from it. Salespeople who respect how many answers their prospects already have can build business faster and better than ever before.

You have to be willing to change. Rinse and repeat. You have to be willing to change everything you KNOW about how to interact with sales prospects.
Quoting from the article:

• evaluate prospects according to criteria different from those used by other reps, targeting agile organizations in a state of flux rather than ones with a clear understanding of their needs

• seek out a very different set of stakeholders, preferring skeptical change agents over friendly informants

• coach those change agents on how to buy, instead of quizzing them about their company’s purchasing process

These sales professionals don’t just sell more effectively—they sell differently. This means that boosting the performance of average salespeople isn’t a matter of improving how they currently sell; it involves altogether changing how they sell.

You can find Katherine Parker kparker@proximab2b.com and other Proxima B2B company contributors in lots of places:

@proximaB2B on Twitter

www.proximab2b.com

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