NAVIGATING THIS BOOK
This book is organized into four parts, and each part is
divided into several chapters. We recommend that you
read the book sequentially, as each part builds upon ideas
expressed previously.
It is important to understand one other aspect of how
this book was developed. Often books of this type provide
useful ideas and concepts but leave the readers to their
own devices in terms of taking meaningful action. The
intent of this book is to both provide a context of key concepts
and principles for solution-centricity, as well as provide
a practical framework for taking action within your
organization.
To that end, the first three parts of the book provide a
traditional reading experience, where concepts and ideas
related to solution-centric transformation are presented.
However, Part Four is somewhat different; here we provide
a comprehensive set of assessment criteria that can
actually be used by your organization to evaluate where
potential sales performance gaps exist. In addition, this
section of the book also provides numerous templates and
tools that can be applied to adopt a more solution-centric
approach. In other words, in Part Four of the book, we
delve deeply into the practical details of how to make the
transition to being solution-centric.
The four parts of the book are organized as follows:
• Part One: A New Sales Environment. This section
makes the case for transforming into a solution-centric organization. It describes the emerging focus on
solution-centricity, the growing trend on solutions
focus, and common reactions to sales performance
problems in business today.
• Part Two: Solution-Centric Concepts and Principles.
This part describes the essential principles of solution-
centricity and how to embrace them. It explores
the dangers of pseudo-solutions, describes the implications
for sales, and explains the kinds of organizational
transformations needed to become
solution-centric.
• Part Three: A Practical Framework to Drive Performance
Improvement. This section describes a systemic
approach for aligning marketing and sales
functions to support solution-centric behavior, and
how to integrate those activities to improve revenue
generation.
• Part Four: Sales Performance Health Check. This section
provides a practical assessment methodology for
objectively determining where systemic factors are
most likely having a negative impact on overall sales
performance. In addition to presenting fundamental
assessment criteria for each of 24 performance areas,
Part Four also includes numerous templates and tools
that can help to establish improved rigor in the understanding
of customer problems and needs. In addition,
many of these templates and tools help to create
a common, solution-centric frame of reference and
language between marketing and sales that can help
to align and drive the corporate revenue engine.
Introduction
Before we proceed any further, please note this is not
primarily a research book about becoming and being solution-
centric. We don’t extensively compare and contrast
groups of companies and then isolate a set of behaviors or
principles that separate the “good” companies from the
“bad” companies. It’s not that these types of books aren’t
valuable or informative. There are literally dozens of wellwritten
and well-researched business books that examine
successful and less successful companies and then correlate
success criteria with certain practices and principles.
While we utilize some research to illustrate key points or
to support concepts about solution-centricity, this book is
oriented more to the future—to a future state you desire
for your organization and, more importantly, to a practical
approach for how to get there.
In our experience working with hundreds of corporations
for almost two decades, companies need more than
collections of ideas and principles from “successful” peers,
because many transformational concepts can be so allencompassing
that companies don’t know how to take
meaningful, prioritized action.
Our goal here is to be more practical and
definitive—to rescue the term solution-centric
from the fate of customer-centric.
Think for a moment about the customer-centric movement.
There have been so many articles, books, white
papers, discussion threads, blogs, and seminars about customer-
centricity that the term has been rendered almost
meaningless. It’s not that there aren’t good ideas to be
found in this content—it’s that there are so many perspectives
and nuances of what it means to be customer-centric
that companies are left to fashion their own interpretations
and courses of action. So what usually happens in
this situation? We’ve all been there. Typically there is some
executive declaration about the bold new company philosophy,
posters appear in every hallway, and the organization
embarks on a variety of projects and initiatives that
are going to “transform the company.” But a year or two
later, little has actually systemically changed the “DNA”
of the company. That’s unfortunate because some of the
core ideas about customer-centricity are very valuable.
Our goal here is to be more practical and definitive—to
rescue the term solution-centric from the fate of customercentric.
In this case, less is more. What companies don’t need
is a thousand ideas, opinions, and perspectives about how to
become more solution-focused. Instead, companies that are
legitimately striving to become solution-centric need practical
“recipes” and specific methods to realign their businesses.
That is, they need a finite number of alignment concepts
and principles and a corresponding set of actual steps they
can take to transform key aspects of their revenue engine.
This is where the term solution-centric has an advantage
over the term customer-centric, because we can
define the former more narrowly—which we will do later
in this book. This definition allows us to create a manageable
set of alignment principles, primarily in sales and
marketing, that lead to an actual methodology for systemic
transformation.
So we’re not attempting to identify every facet of what
it means to be solution-centric here. Such an initiative
would likely require multiple volumes and years. For
almost 20 years, we have been helping major corporations
make a fundamental transformation—from selling products
to selling solutions. In this book, we attempt to focus
on a manageable starting point that entails key aspects of
corporate transformation that directly impact the revenue
engine—the ability to consistently market and sell highvalue
offerings that address real customer problems and
needs. But here’s the irony—after years of training thousands
of salespeople in hundreds of companies to sell solutions,
we’ve discovered there is much more to effectively
selling real solutions than simply educating the sales force.
While investments in sales training and process integration
pay significant dividends, many companies are interested
in getting to an even higher level. They ask, “How
can we integrate and extend the principles of Solution
Selling more broadly into our overall business model to
increase the probabilities of sustained sales growth?”—in
essence, “What is the corporate methodology for selling
solutions?” We address that question in this book.
In our years of experience across multiple organizations,
we have discovered numerous holistic factors that
can contribute significantly to effective Solution Selling. In
two previous books, one of our authors, Keith, focused on
process and behavior changes solely within the sales
organization (The New Solution Selling, McGraw-Hill,
2004) and on practical tools, application exercises, templates,
and scripts (The Solution Selling Fieldbook,
McGraw-Hill, 2005) to help salespeople and companies
apply the Solution Selling approach to be more effective at
sales execution. In this book, we delve more deeply into
the systemic, cross-functional factors that enable Solution
Selling excellence across the organization—the consistent
ability to make the best possible connections with the
most appropriate buyers during sales interactions.
The earlier books explained how to sell solutions
through a consultative selling approach that diagnosed a
customer’s problems and framed the answer to those problems
as an integrated solution. When we ask the sales force
to become more consultative, however, we must also pose
the questions: “How can we become a better problem-solving
organization?” and “How do we provide direction and
support to salespeople continuously and synergistically
across the organization so the impact of the interaction
with buyers is the best it can be?” The challenge in accomplishing
this is in framing a realistic set of principles for
making the transformation to solution-centric behavior
and in defining an approach to change that is at the same
time systemic but also practical and achievable.
NAVIGATING THIS BOOK
This book is organized into four parts, and each part is
divided into several chapters. We recommend that you
read the book sequentially, as each part builds upon ideas
expressed previously.
It is important to understand one other aspect of how
this book was developed. Often books of this type provide
useful ideas and concepts but leave the readers to their
own devices in terms of taking meaningful action. The
intent of this book is to both provide a context of key concepts
and principles for solution-centricity, as well as provide
a practical framework for taking action within your
organization.
To that end, the first three parts of the book provide a
traditional reading experience, where concepts and ideas
related to solution-centric transformation are presented.
However, Part Four is somewhat different; here we provide
a comprehensive set of assessment criteria that can
actually be used by your organization to evaluate where
potential sales performance gaps exist. In addition, this
section of the book also provides numerous templates and
tools that can be applied to adopt a more solution-centric
approach. In other words, in Part Four of the book, we
delve deeply into the practical details of how to make the
transition to being solution-centric.
The four parts of the book are organized as follows:
• Part One: A New Sales Environment. This section
makes the case for transforming into a solution-centric organization. It describes the emerging focus on
solution-centricity, the growing trend on solutions
focus, and common reactions to sales performance
problems in business today.
• Part Two: Solution-Centric Concepts and Principles.
This part describes the essential principles of solution-
centricity and how to embrace them. It explores
the dangers of pseudo-solutions, describes the implications
for sales, and explains the kinds of organizational
transformations needed to become
solution-centric.
• Part Three: A Practical Framework to Drive Performance
Improvement. This section describes a systemic
approach for aligning marketing and sales
functions to support solution-centric behavior, and
how to integrate those activities to improve revenue
generation.
• Part Four: Sales Performance Health Check. This section
provides a practical assessment methodology for
objectively determining where systemic factors are
most likely having a negative impact on overall sales
performance. In addition to presenting fundamental
assessment criteria for each of 24 performance areas,
Part Four also includes numerous templates and tools
that can help to establish improved rigor in the understanding
of customer problems and needs. In addition,
many of these templates and tools help to create
a common, solution-centric frame of reference and
language between marketing and sales that can help
to align and drive the corporate revenue engine.
Introduction
Before we proceed any further, please note this is not
primarily a research book about becoming and being solution-
centric. We don’t extensively compare and contrast
groups of companies and then isolate a set of behaviors or
principles that separate the “good” companies from the
“bad” companies. It’s not that these types of books aren’t
valuable or informative. There are literally dozens of wellwritten
and well-researched business books that examine
successful and less successful companies and then correlate
success criteria with certain practices and principles.
While we utilize some research to illustrate key points or
to support concepts about solution-centricity, this book is
oriented more to the future—to a future state you desire
for your organization and, more importantly, to a practical
approach for how to get there.
In our experience working with hundreds of corporations
for almost two decades, companies need more than
collections of ideas and principles from “successful” peers,
because many transformational concepts can be so allencompassing
that companies don’t know how to take
meaningful, prioritized action.
Our goal here is to be more practical and
definitive—to rescue the term solution-centric
from the fate of customer-centric.
Think for a moment about the customer-centric movement.
There have been so many articles, books, white
papers, discussion threads, blogs, and seminars about customer-
centricity that the term has been rendered almost
meaningless. It’s not that there aren’t good ideas to be
found in this content—it’s that there are so many perspectives
and nuances of what it means to be customer-centric
that companies are left to fashion their own interpretations
and courses of action. So what usually happens in
this situation? We’ve all been there. Typically there is some
executive declaration about the bold new company philosophy,
posters appear in every hallway, and the organization
embarks on a variety of projects and initiatives that
are going to “transform the company.” But a year or two
later, little has actually systemically changed the “DNA”
of the company. That’s unfortunate because some of the
core ideas about customer-centricity are very valuable.
Our goal here is to be more practical and definitive—to
rescue the term solution-centric from the fate of customercentric.
In this case, less is more. What companies don’t need
is a thousand ideas, opinions, and perspectives about how to
become more solution-focused. Instead, companies that are
legitimately striving to become solution-centric need practical
“recipes” and specific methods to realign their businesses.
That is, they need a finite number of alignment concepts
and principles and a corresponding set of actual steps they
can take to transform key aspects of their revenue engine.
This is where the term solution-centric has an advantage
over the term customer-centric, because we can
define the former more narrowly—which we will do later
in this book. This definition allows us to create a manageable
set of alignment principles, primarily in sales and
marketing, that lead to an actual methodology for systemic
transformation.
So we’re not attempting to identify every facet of what
it means to be solution-centric here. Such an initiative
would likely require multiple volumes and years. For
almost 20 years, we have been helping major corporations
make a fundamental transformation—from selling products
to selling solutions. In this book, we attempt to focus
on a manageable starting point that entails key aspects of
corporate transformation that directly impact the revenue
engine—the ability to consistently market and sell highvalue
offerings that address real customer problems and
needs. But here’s the irony—after years of training thousands
of salespeople in hundreds of companies to sell solutions,
we’ve discovered there is much more to effectively
selling real solutions than simply educating the sales force.
While investments in sales training and process integration
pay significant dividends, many companies are interested
in getting to an even higher level. They ask, “How
can we integrate and extend the principles of Solution
Selling more broadly into our overall business model to
increase the probabilities of sustained sales growth?”—in
essence, “What is the corporate methodology for selling
solutions?” We address that question in this book.
In our years of experience across multiple organizations,
we have discovered numerous holistic factors that
can contribute significantly to effective Solution Selling. In
two previous books, one of our authors, Keith, focused on
process and behavior changes solely within the sales
organization (The New Solution Selling, McGraw-Hill,
2004) and on practical tools, application exercises, templates,
and scripts (The Solution Selling Fieldbook,
McGraw-Hill, 2005) to help salespeople and companies
apply the Solution Selling approach to be more effective at
sales execution. In this book, we delve more deeply into
the systemic, cross-functional factors that enable Solution
Selling excellence across the organization—the consistent
ability to make the best possible connections with the
most appropriate buyers during sales interactions.
The earlier books explained how to sell solutions
through a consultative selling approach that diagnosed a
customer’s problems and framed the answer to those problems
as an integrated solution. When we ask the sales force
to become more consultative, however, we must also pose
the questions: “How can we become a better problem-solving
organization?” and “How do we provide direction and
support to salespeople continuously and synergistically
across the organization so the impact of the interaction
with buyers is the best it can be?” The challenge in accomplishing
this is in framing a realistic set of principles for
making the transformation to solution-centric behavior
and in defining an approach to change that is at the same
time systemic but also practical and achievable.
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