Creating Solutions - a new approach

We come across two common problems that dynamic SfS clients grapple with:

They have great solutions – combinations of products and services that solve a customer’s problem – but are product-centric, so haven’t captured the details of the solutions, with the result that they can’t replicate solutions sales
They have a great portfolio of services but haven’t packaged them into a succinct set of propositions, so salespeople find them hard to sell and clients can’t see the benefits

To address these issues SfS have introduced a new offering, the Solutions Workshop, now proven with companies as diverse as Openreach, Logica and Invensys.

Why solutions?

Your customers’ perspective

Wants solutions to problems not products & services
Seeking suppliers that really understand their business needs
Requires best economic solution not lowest priced component
Wants access to expertise from other markets and companies
Needs innovation that can deliver competitive advantage

Your perspective

Increases value (and price)
Reduces pressure to discount
Differentiates offering
Exploits expertise more effectively
Makes selling easier
Avoids duplication of sales effort across product lines
Increases share of customer’s spend
Makes switching more difficult
Improves relationships

Overview

Many companies in the IT, Technology and Telecommunications markets struggle with the concept of selling solutions. They have a strong product focus, and an organisational structure that is product or regionally aligned, which means that it appears easier to sell a single product rather than a complete solution. In fact product companies often sell solutions, but as one-off customer projects. By reviewing these solutions, selecting those that are reproducible and resalable, and offering these to all customers you can achieve significant benefits (see the call-out box above) whilst spreading the solution development cost across multiple customers.

The first step towards taking advantage of this opportunity is to identify and review the potential solutions, and select which ones can be replicated and sold to other customers profitably. The selected solutions must then be productised, with clear propositions that sales people and partners can sell. To accelerate this process, and give your sales people a clear understanding of the solution concept, Solutions for Sales (SfS) has introduced the Solutions Workshop.

The challenge

One-off solutions are created by entrepreneurial sales people, often with the support of product and services teams. They take a long time to develop, bringing together product and services in an innovative way to solve the customer’s problem.

It’s possible that the customer has a unique problem. More realistically the customer may be leading the pack and potentially be the first of many. How do you exploit that opportunity? The team may have dispersed and moved on to new projects. If the solution is replicated several times the knowledge may still not escape from a specific region or sales team. The challenge is to identify the winning solutions, ensure the details are captured and create a proposition that can be sold by the whole of the salesforce. That’s what we help you achieve through the Solutions Workshop.

Solutions Workshop

The SfS Solutions Workshop is a one day deep dive with the objective of identifying and documenting key solutions that have the potential to increase sales. The workshop starts by defining solutions and ensuring everyone understands the concept and objectives. It can then follow two paths:

Solutions Development Workshop which identifies, selects, and captures the key elements of existing solutions and packages them in a proposition. This is of most value to product oriented companies.

Solutions Portfolio Workshop which takes a group of services and develops a set of market orientated propositions. This is of most value to services companies that have a range of offerings or practices but few specific solutions.

The workshop is offered as a stand-alone engagement but is typically run the day before a Strategic Sales Program Marketing Workshop. In this context it enables the Marketing Workshop to focus on a small number of solutions and capture how to sell the pre-defined propositions.

As with the Marketing Workshop, it is important to have the correct mix of attendees including sales, product and services representatives. Ideally those that have been involved with selling the solutions, or delivering them to their customers. Typically this group will come from across the organisation, both geographically and by product.

During the workshop we progress through a series of exercises to develop, select and refine the potential solutions, before capturing the information to build the proposition. The structure of the day is adjusted to suit the specific product, service and market mix, and the background of the team.

If the workshop is a precursor to a Strategic Sales Program Marketing Workshop we’ll identify the “star” propositions that can be coherently covered by the Sales Guide, as shown in green in the figure.

When would you use a Solutions Workshop?

Although there is no definitive template, we’ve found there are a number of situations where the Solutions Workshop really pays-off – see the call out box. The symptoms are often subtle; but telling signs are that the product is gradually becoming commoditised; professional services are too often given away; margins are low because every project is a one-off – the Solutions Workshop offers a fast way to fix these problems.

Use the Solutions Workshop when you have:

Success in point solutions
Undocumented solutions
Too many products, with no structure
Large service portfolio, but no clear propositions

What are the benefits?

A Solutions Workshop is a significant investment, not just in terms of our involvement, but in the time of those attending. Our experience is that the workshop achieves in one day something that would have taken months if done internally. Specifically it:

Captures solutions that have real value to the customer so that they can be replicated and sold across the organisation
Links what’s being sold to business objectives, providing a tangible way for the salesforce to sell solutions
Promotes cross-company working. Not by team building exercises but by practical business orientated work that enables participants to use their expertise and experience
Maximises the value from the SfS Strategic Sales Program by ensuring deliverables focus on customer solutions, not product sets

To the wider salesforce it:

Provides a solutions approach aligned to customers’ needs
Focuses the sales team on the solutions that will bring in profitable revenue
Helps differentiate their offerings

The SfS advantage

We provide a structured process which identifies winning solutions; not just niche offerings designed for a particular customer or territory but profitable, reproducible and widely saleable solutions. We do this by working through a series of selection exercises to filter the solutions and identify those with the biggest potential. Our experience of developing sales tools enables us to select the solutions that offer good revenue potential and can be most easily positioned in front of prospective customers. We distil the proposition down to one sentence and a descriptive paragraph – if it can’t be coherent at that level it’s unlikely to be easy to sell – and then build up the sales messaging from that foundation.

Conclusions

Solutions directly address customer problems, so prospects are likely to be more receptive and the offering better differentiated against competitors’ products. Many companies recognise that they need to sell solutions but have difficulty defining the right solutions to offer the market. The Solutions Workshop is a tool for rapidly identifying, defining and documenting winning solutions so they are transformed from one-off projects to productised offerings that can be sold to every qualifying customer. When used as part of the SfS Strategic Sales Program, the Solutions Workshop ensures that sales enablement materials are properly targeted to deliver profitable sales.

See more details of the Solutions Workshop here.

This article was written by Alastair Fox of Solutions for Sales. For more information email or call +44 (0)1702 586742.