Exploring Impact and Growing the Sale

I was recently in a meeting with a company President, Vice President of Sales, and a Sales Operations manager. When we began the conversation, I wanted to learn more about the sales challenges they were trying to overcome. I quickly learned that each person recognized the same challenge for their organization, but believed that there were very different reasons for the problem!

I was fortunate that all key decision makers were all available for this discussion, but what if they weren’t all there? What if I was going to provide a recommendation based on only one or two individuals’ input?

I would have been missing critical feedback on what this company needed to solve their problems. Chances are that my companies solution would not meet their collective vision as a company and might impact my ability to continue the dialogue with the client. What measures can we take to avoid this critical misstep?

As sellers, we need to explore how a critical business issue flows through an organization. One person’s critical business issue can become the reason for someone else’s problem. This “pain” could be a problem, critical business issue, potential missed opportunity, or goal that anyone in the organization is trying to overcome. Taking a few minutes to explore impact with your clients can help them address multiple problems and help you grow the size of your opportunity.

Also, helping your clients realize that these pains can flow throughout their entire company will help you create a compelling business case around your capabilities. Just think, if your recommendation will help your client solve three problems and your competition only solves one, who will win the business? 

This Solution Selling® Blog article is also featured on EyeOnSales.com, Here.

For more material on Solution Selling® for SMB see Nick Maslanka’s other articles.

Solution Selling Cartoon: No Pain, No Change

An all too frequent exchange between a salesperson and his manager, talking about solving a customer’s specific problem or pain…

You can find more tidbits of Solution Selling wisdom like this in the Solution Selling Fieldbook.

Solutions Must Be Differentiated Too!

I am always surprised that the concept of articulating clear compelling differentiation somehow seems to get lost when Product Marketing starts developing the messaging to support a solution centric sales process.

 
Feature comparisons and competitive matrices are the core ingredients of effective product centric marketing and selling messages. But unfortunately, when most marketing organizations try to make the transition from product centric to solution centric messaging the focus seems to change from communicating differentiation to one of just describing how their products and services solve the customer’s problems.

Solution messaging is all about clearly communicating value from the Customer’s perspective in the context of the problem they are trying to solve. To be truly effective however, solution centric messaging needs to clearly articulate two kinds of value:

1. Generic Value: How your solution solves a particular business problem in a similar fashion to your competitors, along with the value the customer will realize by solving that particular problem.
2. Differentiated Value: How your solution solves a particular customer problem better, faster, or cheaper than your competition, along with the metrics and proof to substantiate that claim.

The combination of Generic and Differentiated Value represent the “Value DNA” of an organization. It’s the reason people buy from you, and your best sales and marketing people intuitively understand and can clearly articulate it.

Unfortunately most marketing organizations haven’t figured out how to capture and institutionalize this knowledge throughout the rest of the Marketing and Sales organization. The failure to address this issue is the root cause of the Marketing & Sales disconnect, and it’s why many marketing organizations are losing their strategic relevance to the business as a whole. 

This is why it’s critical for Marketing Organizations to develop their solution centric messaging around a clearly defined Problem-Solution Map. As shown in the following diagram these maps are nothing more than feature benefit lists that are defined from the customer’s perspective and in the context of specific customer problems.

This is what drug companies have been doing for years and I know it sounds like Marketing 101, but our experience shows that most companies never create a Problem-Solution Map.

As the diagram shows, the key to defining your company’s Value DNA and creating an effective Problem-Solution Map  is the process of breaking  down the customer’s problems and needs into a couple of  key causes so that you can then define your Generic and Differentiated Value in the context of those causes. Unfortunately, most Product Managers and Product Marketers struggle with this fundamental aspect of solution centric messaging.

This is why training the Product Marketing team on the differences between product and solution marketing is so important. And, it’s why implementing a formal problem solution mapping process should be the first step in any solution marketing initiative. In fact these two transformational initiatives are arguably the most important actions a Marketing Executive can take to increase their organizations relevance to Sales and its strategic impact on the enterprise.