Summary

Solution Selling: In The Collaborative Era

Solution Selling® (SS) is a highly interactive training program for sales professionals, based on findings of buyer behavior research published in the best-seller book, The Collaborative Sale: Solution Selling in a Buyer-Driven World.

SS is a high-performance sales execution methodology, which includes supporting processes, tools, and critical skills development. Designed to keep the customer as the focus of every sales engagement,
this program enables selling professionals to substantively increase win rates and revenue production by:
• Providing higher and differentiating value to buyers – not only by what they sell, but more importantly, by how they engage with customers
• Aligning effectively with buyers at every stage of their purchase decision process
• Understanding the critical business issues or potential missed opportunities faced by customers, and providing valuable insight for addressing those issues
• Engaging transparently with buyers throughout the buying process
• Co-creating valuable solutions with buyers
• Collaborating as equals with buyers throughout the selling process, and advising them effectively and efficiently to a good buying decision and business outcome

Introduction

WHY USE SOLUTION SELLING?
In today’s global marketplace, sales executives are asking themselves:
• How can we find enough opportunities to meet our sales goals?
• How can our sales team compete more effectively – and win more often?
• How can our company sell a broader set of our offerings to customers?
• How can our sellers increase the velocity of sales opportunities and close them sooner?
• How can our organization deliver higher levels of revenue and profit?

At the same time, buyers are becoming much more knowledgeable, empowered, and demanding in their dealings with sales professionals. In order to make a buying decision, they must:
• Have a compelling need to act
• Be able to quantify the impact and value of any purchase
• Know that they are selecting the optimal choice
• Be confident that they can implement the solution successfully, and realize benefits as expected

Some who are unable to fulfill these buyer demands lose deals – not just to direct competitors, but also to buyers’ decisions to take no action at all. Therefore, to compete in today’s tough marketplace sales professionals need to:
• Find and connect with potential buyers in a useful way, using an optimum mix of social selling tools and traditional prospecting methods
• Provide valuable business insight about how they can address buyers’ problems or capitalize on a potential opportunity
• Develop agility to rapidly understand each buyer’s state and align behaviorally
• Quickly understand each customer’s critical business issues, their causes and effects
• Identify the influencers and focus of power in each buying decision process
• Engage in meaningful sales conversations that help buyers develop a clear vision of solutions to their problems
• Collaboratively quantify the value of potential solutions with buyers
• Anticipate and mitigate buyer risks, and provide a clear path to a decision
• Minimize discounts and concessions to protect margins at the close
• Manage sales pipelines and territories to ensure consistent revenue production

Solution Selling® addresses these selling challenges by fully aligning the sales professional’s behavior within each buyer’s decision process, and thus accelerating the time to results.

PROGRAM OBJECTIVES
During a SS workshop, sales professionals and sales managers will learn:
• How and why buyer behavior has changed, making them more empowered than ever before
• How successful sellers, including the best of the best, align effectively with empowered buyers to produce consistently high results
• The three sales roles – or “personae” – needed to align with buyers, and when to employ them
• How to develop a personal brand, built on situational fluency and expertise
• How to connect with early-stage buyers, by using both social selling and traditional prospecting methods
• How to engage in valuable sales conversations that help buyers develop a clear vision of solutions to their problems
• How to collaborate with buyers to co-create and agree on solution value
• How to mitigate buyer’s perceptions of risk, in order to help them make a confident buying decision
• How to negotiate and close business while minimizing discounts and concessions
• How to evaluate sales opportunities and determine their quality
• How to implement and apply the principles of SS on an ongoing basis

Participants work on the program exercises in teams, to promote sharing of ideas and exchanges of best practices. Teams conduct structured peer reviews of exercise results, culminating in a final, competitive presentation that illustrates an example application of program concepts.