The Challenger Sale

THE PATH TO SOLUTION SELLING
Solution selling comes in many flavors, but generally describes the
migration from a focus on transactional sales of individual products
(usually based on price or volume) to a focus on broad-based consultative
sales of “bundles” of products and services. The key to its success is the
creation of bundled offerings that not only meet broader customer needs in
a unique and valuable way, but also that competitors can’t easily replicate.
The best solutions, therefore, are not just unique, but sustainably so,
allowing a supplier to address customer challenges in either new or more
economical ways relative to the competition.
Why does that matter? Solution selling is largely driven by suppliers’
attempts to escape dramatically increasing commoditization pressure as
individual products and services become less differentiated over time.
Because it is harder for a competitor to offer the full spectrum of

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capabilities comprising a well-designed solution bundle, it’s much easier to
protect premium pricing in a solution sale than in a traditional product sale.
Not surprisingly, the approach has become widely popular across
business-to-business sales for that reason. In fact, to get a sense of how
widespread solution selling has become, in a recent survey we asked sales
leaders to characterize their primary sales strategy across a multistep
continuum from traditional product sales on one end to full-on customized
solution selling on the other. The result? Fully three-quarters of respondents
reported aspirations to be some kind of solutions provider to a majority of
their customers. Essentially, some flavor of solution selling has become a
dominant sales strategy across almost every industry.
Source: CEB, CEB Sales Leadership Council, 2011.
Figure 1.1.
The Shift from Product to Solution Selling
Now, we don’t dispute the value of this long-term migration to solution
selling—particularly as a way to escape relentless commoditization
pressure—but the strategy nonetheless brings with it a number of real
challenges. Chief among them are two challenges that explain how—and

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why—the solutions model has necessarily evolved over time. The first is
the burden that solutions places on the customer. The second is the burden it
places on the rep.