What are you Really Selling? (hint – solutions)

Posted on November 25, 2019 Updated on November 29, 2023

It is interesting to see Sales and Marketing people still focusing on features, performance, cost, and even value without creating a linkage to what that means to a company from a business perspective. Once you understand what your prospect is buying and why they need it, you can connect with them meaningfully to increase your win rate.

A sales adage from the 1940s (source) asserts, “No one wants a drill. What they want is the hole.” Today, that basic understanding of why people and companies buy is often lost in sales and marketing messages. Sales success is all about solving problems and satisfying needs.

Several years ago, my team and I were selling a new Analytics Database that was genuinely different. Still, our message was identical to every other database vendor – “70% – 100% faster than every other product.” It is nearly impossible to differentiate your product using a non-differentiated message. Don’t treat your product or service as a commodity if it is not one.

I flipped the messaging to focus on business needs. We created a weekly webinar focused on Why Fast Matters. Query response time is important, but responsiveness to customer needs and requests is essential. What if they did not need to wait a week or two to have new indexes created or a month to have a Star Schema updated? They could just run queries as-is, maybe wait a minute instead of a second or two, and have what they need then and there. That message resonated; we sold the first 50% of that product globally. When the Australian team began using our messaging, their sales also increased. Funny how that works.

Effectiveness is all about results and intended outcomes. Efficiency is about achieving those results with the least time and effort invested. It doesn’t mean that we are looking for a lazy approach to find a win. Instead, it is about identifying repeatable patterns that circumvent unnecessary activities, accelerate the sales cycle, and minimize related costs. 

The way to help yourself understand what you are selling is to view things from your prospect’s perspective. What struggles are they likely facing? Where are the greatest opportunities to help their type of business? Are you analyzing data to attempt to assess their unmet needs? Your insight can become a huge differentiator, especially if you can teach them different and better ways to do something (ala the Challenger Sales Model).

What is the difference between your prospect company and its main competition? This analysis requires a general understanding of the problem space and a more specific understanding of the prospect company, its history, and 2-3 main competitors. It also requires an honest account of how your company and products compare to the competition so that you can play up your strengths and limit your investment in areas where the fit is not as good.

The next item to focus on is messaging. Below are a few examples from my career –

1. Analytics & Big Data – The focus here is often on data volume, the currency of the data, speed of queries, cost, maintenance, and downtime. Those things become essential later in the sales discussion, but initially, companies want to know what problems their product or solution will solve.
   • Some of my fastest deals sold because I demonstrated ways to make better decisions faster and/or identify minor problems before they had the chance to become major problems. Avoiding problems and unplanned outages were critical elements of the messaging.
   • In one case, I closed a significant deal in less than three months by focusing on how a company could provide customers with five years of transactional data. Those customers could use the data to make better purchasing decisions in less time than it took the current system to analyze six months of data. Their sales increased after implementing this modernized system. Helping their customers make better buying decisions faster was the winning message.
2. Embedded Products – While many companies focus on APIs, features, or cost per unit, I would focus on how the product I was selling made things better and easier to manage for improved Customer Support and Customer Satisfaction.
   • I closed a $1.1 million deal in less than two months to a medical device company by focusing on the life cycle of those devices (often 10-15 years) and how their customers needed consistency from machine to machine. Consistency over time was the winning message here.
   • After being approached by a Defense Contractor for a relational database product for a new Flight Simulator system, I changed the discussion to the complexity of flight control systems, the need to correlate 30+ operational systems in real-time, and the importance of taking a verbal command and translating it to specific commands for each related system. That led to selling a NoSQL product ideally suited for this complex environment. Letting our software handle the highly complex workload helped us win this deal.
3. Consulting Services – These were not contracting or body shop services (commodities) but actual Business and Technical Consulting services with high visibility and impact. In these cases, expertise, experience, and having a track record of success in different but demanding scenarios provided confidence. These were often multi-phase engagements to prove our value before making a significant commitment.
   • In a bid against two well-established competitors, we won a deal with a large Petroleum company worth nearly $500K. The proposal included information we uncovered about the system and use case and later verified with the prospect, a section on our people and past projects, and a high-level project plan with firm-fixed pricing. We won the bid, and I later discovered that our cost was $50K higher than the largest competitor and $100K more than the other competitor. The customer told me, “Your proposal demonstrated the understanding of who we are and what we need, and that confidence provided the justification to select your company and pay a premium to have the job done right the first time.”
   • My first million-dollar deal was with a company where we demonstrated our ability to solve problems. They knew they needed assistance but were not exactly sure where. I created a “Pool of Days” concept that provided flexibility in the work performed (task, deliverables, and scheduling) but had minimum monthly burn rates and an expiration date to protect my company. The winning messaging this time was that flexibility and the ability to accommodate changing needs without introducing significant risk or additional cost were better ways to buy consulting services. This approach led to many other deals of a similar nature with other companies.

The common theme is helping companies solve their specific business problems from these examples. Even when technology was central to the message, focusing on better outcomes for that prospect and their customers was essential. Value matters, but positive results and better outcomes matter even more for purchasing decisions.

Nobody wants to be responsible for taking a chance on a new vendor and be responsible for a high-profile failure. Helping instill confidence early on makes a huge difference, and following through to successful implementation results in happy customers who become loyal customers who provide references and referrals.

Success starts with selling what you can do from a business perspective for your Prospects. You are solving their problems with solutions they need and avoid getting lost in the noise of the unfocused messaging from most of your competition.

Good Selling!