Friday, December 18, 2009 at 8:00AM This is what happens when you don’t participate in the customer’s vision of a solution first, before you try to re-engineer to a better solution that features your unique capabilities…
You can find more tidbits of Solution Selling wisdom like this in the Solution Selling Fieldbook.
Friday, November 13, 2009 at 8:00AM If selling was this easy, we wouldn’t need sales professionals. People buy from people…
You can find more tidbits of Solution Selling wisdom like this in the Solution Selling Fieldbook.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 8:01AM It’s just common sense that companies who clearly communicate their understanding of the customer’s problem, and then explicitly define their value & differentiation in the context of that problem, have a distinct competitive advantage.
Unfortunately, in order to create effective contextual value and differentiation messages you first need to break down the customer’s problem into its key underlying causes or reasons. This deconstruction of the customer problem into its key causes has long been a fundamental principle of Solution Selling® because the symmetry between the problem/cause hierarchy with the solution/capability hierarchy allows companies to create problem solution maps (see diagram).
As this diagram shows, by clearly defining the key underlying causes of a customer problem, and then mapping your solution’s capabilities to those causes you can more clearly define the two types of value that customers want to know about:
It’s this ability to communicate both generic & differentiated value that creates customer relevant and sales ready solution centric messaging. This is why the foundation of any solution marketing strategy should be a rigorous problem solution mapping process in collaboration with sales. This will get everybody on the same page, eliminate most of the arguments between marketing and sales, and insure that the solution’s positioning and marketing messages are customer relevant, sales ready, and consistent, regardless of how they’re delivered.
Friday, November 6, 2009 at 8:00AM Customers usually buy things based on their emotional response, then justify it with logical reasons…
You can find more tidbits of Solution Selling wisdom like this in the Solution Selling Fieldbook.
Recurring Revenue within Existing Accounts vs. Acquiring New Customers
What Happens When Sales Organizations Focus Exclusively On Recurring Revenue within Existing Accounts vs. Acquiring New Customers?
Apart from having no repeatable sales process, misalignment of their marketing efforts, and ineffective pipeline management they had little to no focus on selling to new customers and spent all their time servicing the existing by pushing renewals and upgrades. In fact, the only new logo business would come via unsolicited RFP’s (Tenders). And we all know the low win rates associated with sellers who live their lives as “Column Fodder”. Of course, based on the “compensation drives behavior” theory the sellers were compensated on this approach. To drive renewals sellers would do things like discount high profit items, namely services, to get the additional licensing revenues. In my humble opinion their poor performance was preordained by their approach.
We have all heard of – and many of us follow - the supposition that selling to existing customers is easier and a more cost effective way to generate revenue and thus a great way to grow business. Based on a recent observation I would like to offer a contradictory theory to this widely held perspective.
At SPI we have recently started working with a client that is a venture capitalist. The principals of this firm worked as executives in some of the top software companies in the world so they focus on their comfort zone; acquiring and turning around failing software companies. Among all of these failing companies that get acquired I have observed a consistent theme:
I cannot and will not advocate a complete reversal of their approach but I will make the obvious recommendation that balance is the key to their salvation. Not backing the truck up to their loading dock and dumping your products and then running like hell for the next logo, but a “healthy pipeline” of net new and existing customer opportunities supported by effective and attentive customer service is the best practice.