Sales & Business Development Blog

The shift from product selling to solution selling has brought huge benefits, yet also posed big challenges, for sales professionals and selling organisations over the past decade.

The benefits of this shift include:

• Higher value sales.
• Greater customer satisfaction.
• More long-term supplier-customer relationships.

However, solution selling has brought the following challenges:

• More advanced selling skills are required (which implies higher earnings for those with the required skills).
• Longer sales cycles.
• Less successful closure rates, i.e. deals slip, get canceled or are lost despite being part of the sales forecast.

The last two points are the biggest reasons why so many sales leaders resist the shift towards solution selling. However, our experience demonstrates that the sales process does not actually have to be longer when selling solutions to clients. Feedback from our sales training courses tells us that an effective consultative sales methodology can make the selling of high value solutions a speedy process and will transform the efficiency of any company’s solution sales force in terms of successfully closing deals on time.

Causes of Failure to Close a High Margin Sale:

Over the hundreds of case studies we have reviewed, we find that the main reasons why sales individuals and sales teams fail to close their deals on time (i.e. in line with their sales forecasts) include:

• No external pressure or compelling event is driving the client to make a change.
• The internal pain-points and cost implications facing the client don’t hurt enough to make ‘change’ a real priority.
• The perceived benefits are not great enough (e.g. return on investment) and are not differentiated from those of the competition.
• The solution doesn’t actually satisfy the client’s needs (a subset of the above).
• The risk of the solution is too high for the prospect (e.g. no relevant case studies have been presented, there is insufficient trust, the impact of failure is perceived as being too high).
• The client doesn’t have the authority to sign the deal (i.e. the sales person is spending time with the wrong contact).
• The customer never intended to buy from the selling organisation (the client may use the selling organisation as a benchmark to leverage a better deal with a stronger competitor).
• The decision makers were too busy to sign the deal.

These factors will tend to increase in the number of objections raised by clients, lengthening the sales process and reducing the rate of successful closes unless sales professionals and sales teams develop adequate sales techniques to counter these sales objections. We find that the least common cause was that the prospect organisation didn’t have the budget to sign the contract. Given the current economic climate this is a particularly interesting observation.

Further Analysis:

In observed sales calls and role-play simulations we also found that sales professionals typically:

• Failed to take the lead in a sales meeting because they failed to start the meeting at a business level with a clear objective to obtain a formal commitment (to a contract, or a project that involved a contract, being signed within an agreed timescale).
• Were poor at funneling from ‘open’, or ‘semi-open’, (i.e. leading) questions down to closed questions at each phase of the meeting.
• Didn’t use a compelling event, the cost of “doing nothing” and/or the value of the solution as a pressure to close.
• Went for the big solution sale in the medium-to-long term but missed the opportunity for immediate wins.
• Couldn’t bridge the gap between the client’s needs and the selling organisation’s products or services with a value-added solution. In other words, they jumped to a product sale too early and killed the higher value opportunity (and often killed the client’s interest!).

Using a Consultative Selling Approach:

In contrast, our research and experience gained from our sales training courses demonstrates that skilled sales people, who apply a consultative approach to selling, are able to overcome the aforementioned limitations and sales objections with greater ease. They were therefore able to proactively sell their solutions more effectively and efficiently, and they were also able to close their deals in line with their sales forecasts.

We found that consultative selling techniques works in any industry and works just as well in the world of B2B selling as it does in any other scenario whereby companies sell high-value solutions to their personal clients. Hundreds of senior decision-making buyers have told us that they hate Feature, Advantage, Benefit (FAB) selling. It’s what gets a sales person a bad name. Effective selling in today’s world (of far more discerning buyers) has to start with the shaping of the client’s needs and has to drive the need and the urgency of the buyer by using:

• The external pressure on the client to change.
• The pain and cost implication of “doing nothing”.
• The client’s (often unconscious) desire for a better world.

Conclusion:

It is a myth that consultative sales techniques are only appropriate for the longer term (and more complex) solution selling environment. Wherever a company aims to sell a bundled solution (or set of services), consultative selling works – regardless of an individual’s experience or the industry they are selling into. By driving the buyer’s needs and creating urgency with a compelling event, sales professionals can speed up the solution sales process and significantly improve their ability to close sales in line with their forecasts.

Recommended Solution:

Sales people and companies need an efficient and effective methodology for consultative selling that enables them to:

• Plan and execute the sales introduction and the sales meeting in a way that creates a high-priority need and a compelling urgency to set up the close.
• Articulate how the value proposition (the value-added solution that the company is offering in terms of compelling business benefits and differentiating advantages) aligns directly to the client’s needs so that the client is compelled to commit to moving forward. This will ensure that a desire for a close is created in the client’s mind.
• Leverage the urgency, the need and the desire to drive the close of the sale in terms of a sales roadmap (from immediate win to medium and long term higher value solutions).
• Efficiently repeat the process for any client on a ‘sell-to’ and ‘sell-through’ basis. This structured approach to selling will help you and your company avoid the common causes of failure which sales professionals regularly experience when attempting to close solution sales and will enhance the bottom-line sales performance.

Written by: Steve Eungblut, Managing Director of Sterling Chase