The End of Solution Sales? Are they Fracking Crazy?

The other night I came across an article/blog titled "The End of Solution Sales", as usual I gave it a read and was not in agreement with several of the statements that were made by the authors.

"But now, owing to increasingly sophisticated procurement teams and purchasing consultants armed with troves of data, companies can readily define solutions for themselves". 

Hey, if the procurement teams and purchasing teams are investigating pricing, they can pretty much find that anywhere for a specific piece of hardware or solution.  The trick is knowing which solution is the right fit and if  there is a better solution that will ease the pain or improve the business process to make it the corporation moer efficient.  You can look up tons of information on the web, however can you really find a solution to specific business problems?  In some cases, I'm thinking yes, however when it comes to true print stream management solutions I'm thinking, not really! 

Let's take this for example:  combine print stream to print 3 pages on NCR paper and staple, a google lookup returns this.  If you got to the second page of the google search you would have seen a few of my blog posts, however nothing on the acutally software that provides the solution.

There will always be Solution Sales and there will always be Solution Sales People, the "End of Solutions Sales" is catchy title and thats about all it is.   Vince from the P4P Hotel forums posting this in reference to the article;  "I hope like Hell my competition reads this and decides to fire their Solutions and Systems Engineers. Beucase then I will have an even easier time of cleaning their clocks!

Why RFPs don't work anymore!

The first couple of paragraphs don't seem to be supported by the end of the article, unless the Super Saleman that he speaks of have in depth technical knowledge of the products they sell and the network environments that they sell them into, Oh wait! That would be a Pre Sales Solution Engineer. Never mind!"

The other statement I am not in agreement with is "The top-performing reps have abandoned the traditional playbook and devised a novel, even radical, sales approach built on the three strategies outlined above. Let’s take a close look at each".  There is NO playbook! Top reps will always find a way to tweak strategiesnd if they don't they will be left in the dust.

I had to chance to look up the three writers for this article/blog and there was one common theme among them (lloed them up on linkedin), seems like none of them had real sales experience and the article/blog they wrote about was based on data.  Come on, if you're really going to claim that this is the end of Solution Sales at least have some experience in sales!

Solution Sales is here to stay, the rep or the company that seeks out new technologies and new solution vendors will always be one step ahead of the competition and always have a creative way to solve a business process. If you don't eat the bear, the bear will eat you!

BTW, here's the link for the article!

-=Good Selling=-