The Solution Selling Empire Strikes Back

I had a quick trip out to Las Vegas this week for a fun ½ day whiteboard class with a new client, and decided to use the air time to clear out some of my backlog of business books. It was either that or dive into Book 5 of “Game Of Thrones”.

So I picked “The Collaborative Sale” and here is my review and my thoughts – in a longer version than the website or the August newsletter – and written from the Sales Engineering viewpoint.

Classic “Solution Selling” has come under fire and criticism since the publication of The Challenger Sale and the July 2012 Harvard Business Review article titled “The End Of Solution Sales”. The Collaborative Sale by Eades and Sullivan is basically a somewhat artificial and heavy 210 page defense of Solution Selling. Updated and modernized, it pushes the concept of collaborating with your customer to end up with the correct “solution”. You do this, as a seller, by adopting one of three personas – the Micro Marketer, the Visualizer and the Value Driver.

My issues (or pains) with this book is that:

#1 – It is extremely salesrep focused, to the point of placing the rep at the top of the pyramid and everyone else subservient to him/her. I may be biased based upon my target audience of Sales Engineers, but this book seemed worse than most in assuming that no-one else really matters and that the rep solely sets strategy. We all know that doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) happen and that on many occasions the old-hand SE has to introduce the new rep to the politics and history of the account and then continually course correct.

#2 – The basic strategy of artificially adopting and shifting persona seems like you are not being true to yourself or the customer. It’s hard to become the “Trusted Partner” if you aren’t being honest with the customer – they’ll see through it. The personas need to become learned and natural behavior rather than forced tasks and interactions.

#3 It is fixated upon Buyer 2.0 and that’s already last year’s model. Much of the statements about Buyer 1.0 and implicitly Seller 1.0 are straw men designed to make a case, rather than be rooted in reality. The market, the competition and the buyer are constantly adapting, and you need to do that as well.

#4 The coaching strategy is based upon weaknesses and gaps rather than building strengths. Any manager who approaches account reviews with their reps in terms of “what did you do wrong” isn’t going to get too far. Imagine if your manager started with “let me tell you the 10 things you did wrong in that demo”.

#5 I feel (and this is just a feeling and is never explicitly stated) that the importance of Discovery in the Collaborative Sale is diminished on the basis that the customer is already 50-60% of the way through a deal and you are always in catch-up mode. My take is that Discovery is becoming even more important rather than less for the SE community. Sales should take it that way as well.

 As an SE I don’t feel there is much to gain from this book versus good old The New Solution Selling (which I do recommend) unless your company is actually adopting this process. There are changes in promoting customer alignment rather than control and the sections on technology you can use to create a self-brand are interesting, but that’s about it.

I do know that SPI (the folks who own Solution Selling) run great classes with role plays and practical examples that have to be far more on target than this book which focuses on the what, but never on the “how do I do that?”.

This isn’t a book for the SE library. The Challenger Sale is more applicable and on point than the Collaborative Sale.

Check The Calendar!

For those of you whose fiscal year ends Dec 31^st, or even if it is just the end of the quarter it is time to check the calendar. Last week I sat in on a North America business review for a technology company that was focused on closing as much as they possibly could in their Q4. “Drain The Pipe” was the phrase of the day.

Except ..

50% of their deals were going to close between December 20^th and December 31^st. (15% were closing on December 25^th!)

90% of those late December deals were scheduled for a Proof Of Concept or heavily customized demo between now and December 20^th – (which is 35 actual days and in reality 32 or 33 business days because of the US Thanksgiving Holiday).

The math didn’t work.

First – given the timing of the holidays, a massive proportion of the buyers, recommenders, approvers and signers will be celebrating the holidays and taking off the entire week of the 23^rd and most likely the 30^th and 31^st as well. No-one is going to be there to complete the sale.

Second – looking at the number of days required to either run a POC to completion or create a custom demo (it’s a highly configurable system) , there were too many days and not enough SE’s – by an overage factor of 100%.

Something had to give. In the end we scrubbed the pipeline, developed some prioritization guidelines and “borrowed” a couple of engineers/consultants who could quickly configure a number of similar demos. They’re still 20% over.

The message – you may the greatest goals in the world for this quarter – but are they logistically and socially achievable? It’s not just the responsibility of sales to look at these things. How does your calendar look for the next 7 business weeks?

(And then next quarter we have the Chinese New Year ….)

Why Businesses Buy Technology

I talk about “The Three Wise Men” a lot in my workshops. They are the guiding principle why businesses make technology decisions – being:

1.       Increase Revenue

2.       Reduce Costs

3.       Mitigate (Decrease) Risk

So it was heartening to read the “connect” article in the September issue of CIO Magazine, which showcased the advice of CIO’s to their peers. In particular, the advice of Rick Roy – the SVP and CIO of CUNA Mutual Group. I quote his advice in full.

“We use three macro-level business metrics to prioritize IT investment decisions and set strategy: revenue growth, cost reduction and risk management and compliance. For line of business spending, it’s rare for someone to introduce a major initiative without a strong connection to one of those. But at the enterprise level it’s more challenging. How does that Windows 7 upgrade really help the business? Whoever presents that case has to make the connection.

Risk mitigation and compliance are the hardest to quantify. We must distinguish between the need-to-have and the nice-to-have. We can’t just say we need to invest in something because the risk is high. What does that mean? Will we lose money? How much? Will we lose customers? How many? We take advantage of our in-house actuarial and risk-modeling expertise to quantify risk.

We look at IT spending in business terms, reporting our costs as an expense ratio. It changes the conversation from “IT costs too much” to a conversation about priorities. It requires more rigor, but it benefits IT to have a clear focus on our top priorities”

Beautiful – well said Rick!! A lesson in there for every single Sales Engineer and every single sales representative.

Something Old, Something New

I’ve been following a number of interesting discussions on LinkedIn over the past few weeks. Many of them are on the same theme as this one – which is “What Are The New Rules of Selling…?”. My response is that other than some technology differences in speed-of-interaction – there are no new rules. They are the same old rules, just rediscovered. If you converse with your customers instead of preach to them; if you discover how they buy instead of forcing the sale; if you focus on value instead of features; and if you focus on results instead of products and solutions – in short, you understand your customer – that’s selling! Old or new.


I often say as a senior IT executive that I never ever bought a solution, I bought results and outcomes. I preferred conversations that focused on revenues, expenses and risk. So I chuckle when I read about the newest Value-based selling, or Curiosity-based selling or any of the other New-old methodologies. In essence, as pre-sales engineers we understand this – it’s rare to find an SE who wants to conduct less discovery and needs analysis; not always something you can say about our sales brethren.




What other sales ideas have come back into fashion?