Your prospective customers know what their problems are. They don’t want to hear about your extensive knowledge of their problem. Consumers need to know how you plan to solve the problem. B2B organizations, in particular, can benefit from providing solutions. Without having a tangible “doohickey” to show someone its best features, selling the solution is an ideal alternative.  Unfortunately for many B2B companies, it’s not as easy as selling a tangible product, but with the help of some tips provided here and an effective CRM platform that can help create these solutions, we hope to help B2B businesses sell solutions more successfully.

Forrester found the 59% of buyers do their own research instead of going through sales representatives because they find sales reps to push agendas instead of solving problems.  So, what if we learned to solve problems instead of pushing agendas?  Selling a solution may just get that group of buyers to talk to us more easily.

How to Sell the Solution

Understand Your Product

To provide a solution to your prospective customers, you’ll need to know your product inside and out. Sales representatives that are armed with all of the information about what they are selling will allow them to avoid being caught off guard with obscure or unusual requests. Having a central location for all of your marketing materials, product features, etc. will be key to ensuring your sales reps have the information they need.

Understand Customers’ Challenges

Another trick of the trade for solution selling is to understand your customers’ challenges even better than they do. Learn all of the pain points they have experienced historically and attempt to predict more that may arise in the future.  Creating a customer persona can help categorize certain groups and understand them in general. Having those personas on hand to target particular groups and to understand the solutions that were successfully sold to others with similar challenges will increase conversions.

Ask Questions

In order to come up with a personalized solution that will sell, ask open-ended questions. Find out what their current problem is, why their current solution isn’t solving it, and what their biggest obstacles are. Much like gathering requirements in order to determine which new software might work best for you, ask similar types of questions to determine the requirements to be met by your prospective customers. The line of questioning alone may just impress them enough to buy!

Answer Questions

This step isn’t actually for you to answer your prospects’ questions. It’s actually to ensure that you remember to answer questions for yourself so that you can create the solution that will make the sale. Answering these questions for yourself will help you determine if your product can solve your prospects’ problems. Determining fit will help you avoid wasting time on people who won’t actually benefit from your offering.  If so, it will help you determine how.

Add Value

In order to sell the solution, you’ll want to make sure you can add value beyond the product features.  For instance, include in your solution what level of customer service your prospects will receive once they are customers.  Such an added value will demonstrate your ongoing commitment to them and that their solution is long-term.

Another way to accomplish this is to provide a selling point that truly demonstrates the value of your product or service.  This may be a little bit trickier as it may change from prospect to prospect.  You’ll want to find what it is that resonates with each individual buyer.  These value-adds may consist of the significant savings of time or money they could experience or that the product will provide them with emotional advantages.

Think Outside the Box

If you’re considering selling a solution, one size will not fit all. Offering a solution with outside-the-box thinking will provide your prospective customers with new perspectives and new ideas that they never would have considered. Knowing your prospects’ specific needs, their pain points, their persona, and so on can all give you the information you need to come up with new ideas to offer.

Offering new ideas and perspectives can also give you a new opportunity to shine by showing prospective customers how knowledgeable you are. Any bit of extra knowledge can show you as an expert in your industry, giving a whole new life to your solution.

Sell the Results, Not the Features

Anyone can spout off a bunch of features about their products or services that explain to prospects what it is you offer. However, people don’t want to hear about the features as much as they do the results.  In simplified terms, you can sell tickets to a concert or you can sell an experience they’ll never forget watching one of their favorite bands at an awesome venue.  Or, for a more relevant example, you can sell software or you can sell a way to save time and money resulting in a better work/life balance and much happier employees.

Consumers tend to buy based on how they feel, not what they get. Learning what they can accomplish and what problems they will be able to solve will sell much easier.

Remove Organizational Silos

In order to sell a solution rather than a product, it’s also important to involve all of the pertinent departments within your organization in your solution. To make that happen, you need to remove those silos in your organization so you can include all of them. Departments such as customer service, marketing, accounting, etc. should all be working with sales in order to provide the most comprehensive solution.

Benefits of Selling the Solution

Selling a solution offers numerous benefits that will increase your conversion rates and, ultimately, your customer satisfaction rates.  First, solutions are much more personalized than simply putting a product out there as a selling point.  Plus, Entrepreneur Magazine explains solution selling as creating genuine connections with your prospects. Between personalization and genuine connections, it’s a tough strategy to beat.

Another benefit of selling a solution is that it allows for support for your prospective customers throughout the entires sales process. Since you are more fully involved in the sale of the solution, you will be more involved in the sales process.

The fact is, solutions speak louder than promises. You promise people that they will benefit from purchasing your product, or you can tell them how your product will solve their problems.

How a CRM Platform Can Help

Implementing a powerful and comprehensive CRM platform will allow you to collect and access all of the information you need to create entire solutions for your prospects and sell to them on a whole new level.  It is the key to managing your sales pipeline and, according to Medium.com, managing sales pipelines is the key to making your sales process more efficient. Agile CRM is one such tool that offers an all-in-one CRM platform so that you will not only have all of your contact management in one central location, but you’ll also be able to collect and share information with other departments to more effectively dissolve those everpresent organizational silos.

Agile CRM also offers sales enablement features that automate everything from lead scoring to appointment scheduling so you can focus on sales while the tool does the work for you. As part of the 500apps Infinity Suite of workplace productivity apps, you can also choose from a plethora of apps so your teams can do much more with way less.

Conclusion

Selling a solution may be a bit more of a challenge at first, but it will prove to help your organization succeed in the long run. No need to reiterate your prospects’ problems or to simply sell a product. Take the opportunity to sell a whole solution.  Creating solutions with the help of a powerful CRM platform like Agile CRM will take your sales to the next level.