Rumors of Solution Selling's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

You can’t really blame our competitors for trying to do and say things to tarnish our brand, Solution Selling® - it’s the nature of the beast when you are among the market leaders… we take it as a confirmation of a leadership position.

When we do confront our detractors on their mischaracterizations, such as “solution selling is dead” or “that methodology is old” or “it’s just an approach where you ask 20 questions and hope you find a problem you can address” they usually come back with the same response… “We didn’t mean your trademarked methodology; we meant the general concept of solution selling.”

We also have to weather the trendy selling phrases that pop up… “Provocative selling”… “Sales challenger”… “Outcome based selling”… (Insert your own trendy phrase here). The irony is that while all of those are relevant approaches, they’ve been approaches inherent in Solution Selling® for years.

Provoke the prospect? – Solution Selling® includes methods, concepts and tools designed to stimulate interest and curiosity by leading with compelling, pain-oriented messages that provoke the prospect from a state of latency to exploration. These targeted, relevant messages focus on problems solved, value attained, and results measured. In this case, the seller or marketer is leading with a message that would rouse interest from their target prospect.

Sales challenger? - Solution Selling® promotes effective, sales conversations that methodically align conversations to where the buyer is in their buying evaluation. And then, consultatively and tactfully challenges the buyer’s current perspective when a more effective solution may exist. To effectively challenge a prospect, a sales professional must have situational fluency around their capabilities and competitive capabilities, the prospect’s market and the issues in which they are faced – all traits of a true Solution Seller.

Outcome based selling? – Solution Selling® defines “pain” not only as a problem or critical business issue that the buyer may have but also as a potential missed opportunity. If there is a potential missed opportunity, you will want to highlight the potential outcome of addressing that missed opportunity.  So while a prospect may not be missing their revenue targets, they may not be operating as effectively as they could be and therefore not maximizing revenues.  In this case, the seller is focusing the conversation/exploration on a potential outcome that would be desirable for the prospect.

While we have trained over a million people worldwide on Solution Selling® and our own pipeline of prospects has grown at a record-breaking rate over the last year, this isn’t a blog about how good we are but rather a commentary on the continued relevance of Solution Selling®.

At the end of the day, a “solution” is an answer to a problem. As a solution selling professional, you should seek to uncover or understand the problem of a customer and then consultatively, explore potential capabilities that can address the problem.

With that being said, as long as there are customer problems, Solution Selling® will be alive and well, until then, rumors of Solution Selling’s demise have greatly been exaggerated.

Solution Selling® stands tall against our retractors. Read more about our competitive differentiators.