Solution Selling: The Elevator, Pain and Strategy

 

Often times, technical people expect solutions to sell themselves. They take the time, develop great products and services, then expect people to immediately adopt what they have done based on the sellers’ perception of value. Yet they are surprised when nobody rushes forward to embrace their concepts. Pushing ideas, or proposals, forward risks trying to sell things for which there are no real or perceived needs. The trick is to get the target audience to value each proposal and thus pull the solution into place.

Perspective

The problem that many would-be sellers overlook involves perspective. You may know what you are selling, but the prospective buyer does not have the same level of understanding. (In this case, “buyer” can mean any targeted adopter of a technology, idea, proposal, etc. The “buyer” may be an actual prospect that you want to sell to for capital gain or the buyer may just be any internal customer that you are working with inside your organization. The concept is the same).

If there is misunderstanding on the part of a prospect, the risk of an invalid valuation rises as well. As a result, they may place too little value and not adopt the proposal or they may place too much value and expect a solution that you and your team cannot deliver. Either scenario is problematic.

The Value Proposition

Whenever possible, do not …

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