Part of a Series: Helping Your Channel Sell Solutions (So they Can Sell More of Your Products…)

In several posts this year I’ve talked about the importance of marketing and selling solutions – if you want to connect with your customer and drive revenue from your products and alliances.

• Today’s Post – (Part 1)
• Do Your Product Business Units Lead to (Product) “Push” Marketing (and Missed Revenue)? (Part 2
• Today;’s Post – What 3 Questions Indicate Whether You Need to Sell “Solutions”? (and when does selling “Product” work better?…)  Part 3
• The Solution Blueprint: A Visual Tool for Connecting with Your Customers (and accelerating product revenue…) (Part 4)
• What are the Steps to Create Solution Messaging? (Part 5)

But is it always a good idea to sell “Solutions”, (When what you really want is for customers to buy your product?) I’ve found that 3 questions below can tell you whether Product or Solution messaging would be more effective to helps sales drive revenue for a particular product and sales situation.

These questions are:

1. Does the product solve the customer problem by itself, or is it a part of a group products/ services needed to solve a problem?
2. How familiar is the target audience with your product category, and the problem that you solve?
3. Where is the individual customer in the buying cycle for your product

Before we dive into each of these questions, let’s back up and look at the customer buying process and how that impacts how we need to sell.. As shown in Figure 1, at the beginning of the sales process, you want to focus on “Why”, to give the customer context on the value you provide. As the customer gets comfortable with “Why,” the customer is looking for the more detailed “What” about the product you are selling.

Figure 1: The Basic Customer Buying/Selling Process

Let’s take an example for a product you know and understand, like an automobile/car. You expect a car to be sold as a “Product”, rather than as a “Transportation Solution”. Why is that?

Question #1

One reason you can sell a car as a “Product”, is that is that the car solves a problem stand-alone. (i.e. a “whole product”).  A car already includes tires, a steering wheel, even gas, so after you buy, you can drive it off the lot and to your house or apartment.

But what if it worked differently? What if you bought a car, and the tires did not come with it (after all, they are made by separate companies). Or perhaps you had to choose car seats separately and get them installed by a “seat installation specialist” after you bought the car chassis.  !)  In this scenario, a customer would have to buy other products and services before they could get the value out of buying a car – so you would have trouble selling a car it would be hard for a dealer to sell a car as a stand-alone product.  That is the exactly way a lot of industries operate (including the Tech industry!), so for many Tech products, you need to sell Solutions (more on this in Figure 3 below)

Think about your product in comparison to the car analogy below.  Where does your product fit?

• The Car – your product is a stand-alone solution (and may incorporate other products as part of that solution) – a “Primary Product”
• The Engine – your product is a key part in driving the decision for the overall solution – a “Secondary Product”
• The Steering Wheel – your product is part of the car and not thought about as a separate buying decision at all – a “Tertiary Product”

Question #2

Another reason is you can sell a Car as a “Product”, is that the value a car provides is obvious to the buyer, (not just the salesperson!).  Most people are familiar with what a car does and why they would want to buy one. Think about the last time you were confused by a new concept or product.  You had questions on the big picture, and wanted to understand the “Forest”, before you got into the “trees” If someone tried to sell you “Product” (the “trees”), and listed a bunch of features, you would not have been receptive…

Question #3

A final variable is where an individual buyer is in the buying process. You may have noticed that car commercials often feature cars taking high-speed turns in the woods on a sunny day, usually with happy, attractive passengers.  Car companies are trying to appeal to car buyers early in their buying process with a feeling like, “Wow, I could see myself in that car.”  They are operating at the beginning of the customer buying cycle – trying to create a case for a change in the status quo.

Now imagine yourself talking to a salesperson in a dealership showroom (I know that can be painful).  He/ she would realize that if you had taken the time to come to the dealership to see the car, you were past the “Why” stage, and they would ask you where you were in the buying process and what questions you had about the car.  If an individual decision maker is past the “Why” stage, then that is a great time to sell “Product”.

Figure 2 below shows how these 3 questions come together into a single visual you can use to determine if your product and customer are likely to be receptive to “Product” selling.

Figure 2: The 3 Indicators for “Solution Selling”

Solution vs. Product in High Tech

But how does this apply to the world of high tech?  In general, what I’ve seen is that many categories of products have moved from the left of this diagram to the right over the past 10-15 years.  Figure 3 below shows criteria that you can use to see where your technology product category is on this continuum, and provides context on why that change has occurred.

Figure 3: When is a “Solution Sale” Needed in HighTech?

What we’ve seen in the industry is an increasingly complex “architecture” being built that consists of many technology vendor product offerings that have a need for sophisticated system integrators to architect and deploy. In that context, it is more difficult to “push products”, since buyers increasingly want to design products into the architecture, rather than buy them reactively based on maintenance cycles.

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