The Challenger Sale

THE CUSTOMER BURDEN OF SOLUTIONS
By definition, a shift to solution selling results in customers’ expecting you
to actually “solve” a real problem and not just supply a reliable product.
And that’s hard to do. It requires that you not only understand the
customer’s underlying problems or challenges as well if not better than they
do themselves, but also that you can identify new and better means of
addressing those challenges, articulate clear benefits from using limited
resources to solve that problem versus competing ones, and determine the
right metrics to measure success. And the only way to do all of that is to ask
the customer lots of questions. So reps spend a great deal of time asking
things like, “What’s keeping you up at night?” in an attempt to truly
understand a customer’s competing challenges.
The problem with all of this “discovery” is that it can often take on the
feel of a protracted ping-pong match between the supplier and customer.
The customer explains their needs, the rep summarizes her understanding,
the customer confirms whether or not the rep got it right, she creates a
proposal, the customer reviews and amends it, and on and on.
This complicated and often rather protracted process requires a huge
amount of customer involvement at each stage, placing two kinds of burden
on the customer: The first is time, and the second is timing. Not only does
this dance entail significant customer commitment across a wide range of
different stakeholders, conference calls, and presentations, but from the
customer’s point of view, most of this effort comes early, before they see
any value. Really, it’s an act of faith on their part that they’re going to get
anything in return for all of their trouble.
This has led to something we call “solutions fatigue.” As solutions
complexity has increased, this burden on customers has gone up as well,
leading customers to engage with suppliers very differently when it comes

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to complex deals. In fact, four trends really stand out in describing how
customer buying behavior is evolving rapidly.