Solution Sales: The End of Solution Sales

Solution Sales: By Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman, July-August 2012

Solution Sales: The hardest thing about B2B selling today is that customers don’t need you the way they used to. In recent decades sales reps have become adept at discovering customers’ needs and selling them “solutions”—generally, complex combinations of products and services. This worked because customers didn’t know how to solve their own problems, even though they often had a good understanding of what their problems were. But now, owing to increasingly sophisticated procurement teams and purchasing consultants armed with troves of data, companies can readily define solutions for themselves.

In fact, a recent Corporate Executive Board study of more than 1,400 B2B customers found that those customers completed, on average, nearly 60% of a typical purchasing decision—researching solutions, ranking options, setting requirements, benchmarking pricing, and so on—before even having a conversation with a supplier.

 and Listen to an interview with Matt Dixon.

http://hbr.org/2012/07/the-end-of-solution-sales/ar/1

Tom McDonald’s Comments:

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Tom