At a Glance
In recent years, as they have sought an edge with their customers,
companies have kept raising the bar higher and higher. The ultimate goal today,
thanks to solution selling, is a "segment of one." Accenture can help your
sales organization make the shift from selling products and services to selling
solutions.
Making it Happen
Overcoming the Challenges
Most sales organizations have felt for years the strong imperative to move their sales people away from a traditional solution strategy in which they focus primarily on selling an individual product or service to customers. As products
become increasingly commoditized, companies are seeking something not so easily
imitated: the ability to sell a tailored solution or a set of products and
services that meet a unique need within the target company. The potential
benefits of this strategy are very real:
- Your sales people move higher up the value chain and now have
a reason to sell to higher-level executives.
- You can create more competitive differentiation by combining
product selling with a value-added service.
- You develop closer and potentially longer-lasting
relationships with customers.
- You can ultimately pursue greater top-line growth due to a
higher ongoing share of your customer’s “wallet.”
Knowing that these benefits exist has made it all the more frustrating
for the many companies that still struggle to make solution selling work for
them. Solution selling requires a much more holistic view of the
seller/customer relationship. The deepest value now resides not in the products
or services themselves (nor even in the bundles of products you can put
together) but in the relationship with the customer, and in the manner in which
you can demonstrate through that relationship how your bundles meet a real
business need. “How are you helping me solve my problems? How can you help me
increase the business value of what I'm doing? Can you help me justify the
value of this purchase to my boss? Can you link what you're selling to my
overall shareholder value? Give me something that is greater than the sum of
the parts of what you're selling me.” These are now the questions driving sales
strategy.
Making It Happen
Based on our work in recent years with Communications and High Tech
clients who have successfully made the move to solution selling, here are a few
things to bear in mind as your company either begins a solution selling
initiative or as you refine existing solution selling tactics.
- Use customer insight and segmentation to
understand where to invest the most in differentiated solutions to
customers. To adapt Orwell's famous phrase, all customers are equal
but some are more equal than others. One accepted benchmark in many companies
today is that roughly 50 percent of your profits may come from only 10 percent
of your customers. At the other end of the spectrum, 40 percent of your
customers only generate 5 percent of your profits. If that's true, then it's
not bad customer service but smart customer service to offer higher levels of
engagement and support to the upper 10 percent. Differentiated treatment,
however, requires some sophisticated mining techniques for translating customer
data into actionable insight. With this insight, companies are then better able
to align their sales people and programs with the customers and channels most
likely to produce the best results.
- Support new sales capabilities in your sales
organization by giving sales people the tools they need. For
example, to effectively sell solutions, a sales organization should be able to
understand and calculate the potential return on investment (ROI) that a
solution will generate for individual buyers. This helps them see how the
solution benefits them not only in technology or process terms, but also
financially. For one of our clients, we implemented an ROI calculator as part
of their new solution selling methodology. It helped the sales force to think
more clearly and rigorously about the business reasons for each sale and how
those solutions would affect the customer financially. The tool ultimately
helped sales people close more sales.
- Provide support for the new sales behaviors you
need through new training and performance management strategies. In
general, most companies underestimate the human performance challenges of
moving to solution selling. Solution selling requires your people to have
deeper industry knowledge, better relationship management skills, and more
focus on adding value to the selling relationship. Developing this level of
individual capability takes a focused effort. Advanced training and performance
support processes and tools are critical for success. For example,
Accenture helped BT to train thousands of its sales people in solution selling
through a performance simulation tool that allowed them to practice this new
kind of selling in a risk-free environment.
Overcoming the Challenges
As with so many important business trends, solution selling is easily
described but challenging to implement. It requires more than just senior sales
management intent. It requires new kinds of training, sourcing, support,
knowledge management, tools, processes and, perhaps most important, new ways of
gaining insights about your various customer segments so you can more
effectively understand and meet their needs.
In recent years, as they have sought an edge with their customers,
companies have kept raising the bar higher and higher. The ultimate goal today,
thanks to solution selling, is a "segment of one." If you have the capability
to move deeply into the value chain of each of your most important customers,
to understand what they need (maybe even better than they understand it
themselves) you've set the bar about as high as it can go. And your competitors
won't be able to clear that bar.
Accenture can help your sales organization make the shift from selling
products and services to selling solutions. The Accenture Sales Transformation
solution is an end-to-end offering featuring an innovative methodology and
toolset that can transform sales performance along multiple dimensions and
enable a high performance selling organization. Contact us to learn more about
our Sales Transformation capabilities and how we can help increase the
performance of your selling organization.
About the Authors: Rob Blakey leads Accenture’s
Customer Relationship Management unit in Accenture’s Communications and
High Tech West group and helped found Accenture’s global CRM group. He has
been enabling sales force transformation initiatives across a variety of
organizations and industries over the last 10 years. Phil Tamminga leads
Accenture’s Global Siebel group and also helped found Accenture’s CRM group.
Learn about the
Accenture Sales Transformation solution
Talk to someone about this topic To Top 
|